If I were a zygote

Hungry after my shift at the grocery store today, I picked up a hot fish sandwich from the deli for $1.99 then agonized over whether to purchase a cold Coke for an additional $1.79. The Coke wasn't strictly necessary; I could drink water just as easily. But there's just something about a Coke to wash down a fish sandwich.

Since it was for my supper, I splurged. 

It was a perfect symbol, I thought, for what my life has become: Painful decisions about trivial matters brought on because I work part time making minimum wage. There isn't a dollar to waste. There is no comfort zone, no savings to fall back should an emergency arise. 

Even if I had a full time job, I would not have enough income to afford my own place to stay, which means I must continue to rely on the kindness of my brother and his family, who allow me to stay in their spare bedroom. If not for them, I would be living in my car or on the street.

I am going to give up liability insurance for my car, even though it's mandatory. I've been driving for more than thirty years and have never had an accident. I will have to take my chances because I can't afford to continue to throw away money on insurance I never use.

Despite a medical condition, I no longer take needed medications because I can't afford them. I'm just asking for trouble, I know, but what to do?

I will soon have to turn my phone off because it's hard to justify spending $100 a month just to have a cell phone. The only reason I have kept my phone is because it allows me to connect to the Internet although my Internet service is very limited and not very good.

Needless to say I don't have cable TV or any of the other bells and whistles of modern American life.  

I buy the Sunday newspaper religiously and immediately turn to the classified section, which consists of two, perhaps three pages. While there's a lot of demand for truck drivers, there are few help-wanted ads for anything else. There are never ads for writer/media types like me, or anything even remotely suitable for my qualifications.

The online job boards are more promising, but most of the companies currently hiring are the big box stores like Dollar General and Lowe's, companies looking for cashiers and customer service clerks at minimum wage.  Almost all are part time, no benefits to speak of.

Complicating matters is the fact that I'm an older worker. Jobs are scarce for older workers. Another complication: I don't go to one of the big churches. I've been told several times that unless you go to one of the big churches, you won't get a decent job because you have to be connected with a church family. Whether that's true or not, I can't say, though I suspect it is. Even if I showed up religiously at the First Baptist Church in downtown Tupelo, what are they going to make of a gay man? That's another problem all by itself. They'd just as soon see me swinging from a magnolia tree.

It's a bleak picture. It's hard to see what sort of future -- if any -- waits for me. 

People have asked me why I don't simply move somewhere else. The answer: I don't have money to relocate somewhere else. At the moment I've got $52 in my bank account. How far is that going to get me? 

I try to be optimistic, but it's hard, and each day it gets harder. I find myself with feelings of increasing desperation. I sometimes think about putting an end to it. I sometimes feel overwhelmed with helplessness and despair. It's embarrassing to not have money enough to pay your bills, to make your own way in the world. It's demeaning, dehumanizing. 

I find it hard to fathom that almost half of all Americans are either at poverty level, where I am, or damn close to it. For three decades our economic policies have favored the wealthy elites, the huge corporations, Wall Street, bankers, stockbrokers, the Mitt Romney types. We were told the wealth would "trickle down." It hasn't. Instead, the middle class has been gutted and millions have been thrown into poverty. 

I'm just one of those millions, one of those hapless statistics, in the wrong place at the wrong time, just one more person for whom the American Dream was only a dream and never anything more.

Poverty is man-made, the natural result of decisions and choices that we, as a society, make. Poverty is the outcome of the economic policies put into place at the state and national levels. Poverty persists because we allow it to do so. As a society, we have decided that we have endless billions to throw away in subsidies for the oil industry, or for war, or for never ending tax relief for the wealthy, but there is no money to help the working poor. 

And so there I was, when my shift ended, agonizing over whether to purchase a Coke for a meager supper. That's what my life has been reduced to. 

I write about it knowing full well there is nothing anyone can do about it, and knowing, too, that others are in far worse shape. 

We are all caught up in America's particularly harsh form of hyper-capitalism of profits at any price, and profits over people. Always profits over people. 

What saddens me is that so many Americans don't realize there are alternatives. Far easier to dismiss me as just one more taker on food stamps than to admit there's something seriously wrong with the way we do business and the way we treat our own.

If I were a zygote, or a corporation, I'd have scads of people passionately caring about my well being. But I'm not a zygote or a corporation, so I'm on my own, as though modern life is nothing more than some half-assed replay of the Wild Wild West. 

Are there no prisons?

The Associated Press

I received my paycheck the other day and it turns out that working a part-time minimum wage job is not particularly profitable. I knew it was going to be a painful moment of truth. I was not disappointed. Twenty-two hours at $7.35 ... well, you do the math.

I take comfort in the fact that I'm not alone. Indeed, according to a widely-circulated figure, about half of Americans are either at and very close to the poverty level. Report after report and figure after figure show that while the wealthy have indeed gotten much wealthier over the past three decades, the poor have gotten much poorer. The chart to the right is just one of many showing this trend.

While wages have stagnated, everything else has gone up - rent, utilities, phone bills, the price of milk, a can of pop, a hair cut, health care, gasoline. Up, up and up. Which means that low income folks  have far less money for the basic necessities than they used to have.

There's a reason why the rich and huge corporations keep getting richer. It takes money to hire an army of lawyers and lobbyists to send to Washington to relentlessly campaign for their interests. It takes money to constantly fight attempts to raise the minimum wage and give workers a living wage. It takes money to get all those tax loopholes and sweetheart deals.

It also takes a lot of money to convince poor people that voting for a certain party is in their own best interests, when it clearly is not. This past election saw a flurry of reports on the subject. Why do the poor keep voting for the Republican Party when its policies are so clearly aligned with the wealthy at the expense of the poor?

One reason, perhaps the major reason, is the culture wars over abortion and gay rights. Since the time of Reagan, Republicans have seized on these divisive issues, promising "change" if elected. This has helped fuel a steady supply of Christian and conservative votes. That Roe vs Wade still stands and gay rights are much farther along than ever does not seem to matter. As long as the wealthy can continue to keep the masses up in arms over these issues, and angry enough to turn out reliably at the polls, that's all that seems to matter.

Along with those culture war issues are a slate of more anger-inducing claims and paranoid whatnot: That the Democrats are Socialists. That Obamacare is socialism. That the president is not even a US citizen. That the "government" is going to take away all our guns. On and on with a tide of nonsense that is never factually based which low-information voters suck it up as Gospel truth - and, most importantly, vote accordingly.

We face an onslaught of spurious reports about how Social Security is going bankrupt, how it's an "entitlement" that needs to be curbed or perhaps even ended.  Unions are the problem. Union workers are thugs who need to be taken down a notch.

An entire war against the poor was rolled out last year by Republicans. Newt Gingrich went around calling Obama the "foodstamp president." The poor were demonized. We were told that people on foodstamps are what's wrong with this country. Point out that 26 cents of every federal tax dollar is spent on defense while a mere .52 cents is spent on "welfare" - well, these folks never let facts get in the way of a self-righteous diatribe.

Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan reduced it all down to "makers and takers." Ryan, poster boy for both Ayn Rand (an atheist) and supposedly a devout Catholic, introduced a budget that professors at a Catholic University felt compelled to denounce as "immoral" for its attacks on the poor. Mitt Romney called the Ryan Budget "marvelous."

In the eyes of folks like Paul Ryan, I'm a taker. Since my pay last week was $137, I'm more than eligible for food stamps, which I use to help make ends meet. To Paul Ryan, I am the problem. Not minimum wage. Not the fact that so many jobs being created by the "job creators" are minimum wage, part-time jobs that do not allow a person to pay their bills. Not the fact that the defense budget eats up the vast share of each federal tax dollar. No. The problem is folks like me.

from Time magazine

Folks like me. No house. No savings. No health insurance. No future. I'm the problem. I'm the taker who's draining the poor taxpayer and impeding economic recovery.

I wonder what Paul Ryan suggests I do? Commit suicide? Live on the street? Does he imagine that good-paying jobs are just throwing themselves at folks like me down in the Magnolia State and that we're just too lazy to go out and grab one?

Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, I can hear Ryan's response:

Are there no workhouses? 

Are the prisons full?  

And here's the rub, the final kick of sand in the eyes: Paul Ryan's father died while Ryan was a teenager and his mother collected government checks to help them survive. The government also generously helped Paul Ryan get an education. But now that he's a maker and not a taker, well, all bets are suddenly off.

Again, don't let facts get in the way of a self-righteous diatribe against the poor. Paul Ryan wasn't the problem. The single mother and her hungry kids down the street sucking up foodstamps was the problem.

Me, I'll take my $7.35 and do the best I can. If I'm unable to save for retirement, I hope Ryan understands.

If you work hard, will you get ahead?

I've just finished my third day as a cashier at a very busy grocery store in downtown Tupelo, Mississippi, birthplace of Elvis. My legs are killing me, the pay is lousy, but I have a curious feeling of gratitude to finally have a job.

Any job.

It's an interesting bit of psychology. After applying for numerous jobs and being overqualified, or lacking the right experience, after searching a job market that relies heavily on the good old boy network to find workers, after being too liberal and uncomfortable with in-your-face religion in a firmly Red State where people have signs in their yards declaring that Jesus is King, after indicating my willingness to work any shift, any day, anytime, for any wage at all, desperation had me grasping at straws.

When an offer came along for a part-time job offering $7.35 an hour, it was like winning the lottery.

But isn't that exactly the way Big Business wants us to feel? Never mind my thirty years of work experience. Never mind my college degree. Never mind my management and supervisory stints. Never mind the maturity that comes with age, that doesn't have to be told to show up on time, to dress cleanly and properly, to treat customers with respect. Never mind all that. Just be glad someone offered you a chance to make $7.35 an hour.

So, even as I'm quite happy to rejoin the workforce, even as I tell myself that I work for a large corporation and there will be opportunities for advancement after my pay my dues, I'm still left with the reality that I won't make enough money to pay the bills. I still have to contend with the fact that Big Business has me over a barrel -- has so many of us over that same barrel. And while they take home tremendous profits, the workers don't share in those profits. The workers are anonymous, faceless worker bees who are used up and all too easily replaced with a never-ending stream of desperate job-seekers to choose from.

Like many of my co-workers, I will now have to look for a second minimum-wage job in the hopes that two of them will be enough to pay for a small apartment. Until then, I'm still at 130 percent of poverty level, so I can continue to use food stamps to supplement my income.

I'm not ashamed of my new job. I believe very much in the dignity of both work and workers, and like so many of society's cast-offs and those who have been left behind in America's brutal form of Capitalism, I would much prefer to work -- any sort of work -- than to remain idle.

That I've fallen on hard times does not anger me. Look at the numbers. About half of Americans are either living in poverty or very close to it. I'm just one more, just another casualty of economic policies that are "business friendly" and not worker-friendly, policies that ensure vast profits for the elite at the expense of the poor.

My books are full of the riff-raff of society -- the poor, the marginalized, hookers, murderers, drug addicts, folks who have been washed out by life because they can't keep up, or don't fit in, or can't find a place at the table.

The writer part of me looks very carefully at my current situation, trying to piece it together, puzzle it out, connect the dots. How did I arrive at this juncture in my life? Should I remain at a job that I don't like just for the security of it? Was a wrong to "follow my dreams" and try for something better? And if this current situation in my life simply preparing me for something much better? Will it open doors to opportunities I have never considered?

How do any of us arrive at this situation? Why do we support, with our votes, economic policies that make this a reality? Why is it that so few people know that minimum wage in France is $11 an hour, and $15 an hour in Australia? Why is it so difficult to persuade American workers that we deserve better? Why have we allowed Big Business to convince us that minimum wage cannot and must not be raised? Why do we so willingly participate in a system that is so obviously not in our best interests?

I am getting glimpses of the answers in the faces of some of my co-workers and customers. Tired. So many people look so tired. Like the woman who came late in the evening to shop for groceries, kids trailing behind her, looking frazzled and harried, shyly swiping her EBT card, exhausted on her feet no doubt from working all day and now coping with kids and food and dinner and the whole business of life. She asked me to total her order item by item because she only had $63 left on her card. She was tired. Too tired to care about what goes on in Jackson or Washington.

I also see a lot of grandparents taking care of their grand kids. Where's mom and dad? Who knows? Perhaps living at home because they can't afford anything else. Perhaps they've run off and left the kids behind. Perhaps they're working two or three jobs and don't have time for their kids.

Some of my younger co-workers stand at the register all day then leave for evening classes at the community college.

Tired.

Restless, busy, on your feet all day, running from one thing to the next, pinching pennies, using coupons, relying on mom and dad, or food stamps, forcing a smile for customers -- it's a strange world that I've landed in.

I've said it often: I've never seen people work as hard as they do in Mississippi. Say what you want about Mississippi being a redneck Red State, the fattest, the least educated, the poorest - say what you want, but the people work hard. The politicians they send down to Jackson or over to Washington have failed them miserably, over and over, decade after decade. Mississippians are fiercely independent and proud. They don't want food stamps. They want jobs. They want a governor who will bring jobs, not spend all his time trying to close down the one remaining abortion clinic.

As a writer, I want to know all about this world. I want to explain it to myself, and to my readers. And although I worry a great deal about my future - what sort of future can I have working at a minimum wage job? - I remain an optimist.

There is a basic promise in America: If you work hard, you will get ahead.

Are those just words?

Stay tuned.