Punishing The Poor Has Been Very Productive For Us, So Pat Yourself On The Back America!

When you are down and out, wealthy Americans are there to kick, and knock you about.

Photo by Solal Ohayon on Unsplash

In mid 1974, seven months after my father lost his job, we were all a few weeks away from living in the street, Dick and Dot, myself and my four sisters. Thankfully, dad did get six months of severance pay, at 60% of his salary. Yes, that was better than nothing, but getting your pay cut 40% overnight will dramatically change your current, and near future perspective. Few Americans are able to continually save enough of their take home pay to cover such a deficit for very long. Luckily, dad was able to get a loan from his aunt. Shortly afterward he also found a job, or just into the eighth month of joblessness. Sadly, he was never able to regain the same financial footing; he died in debt 33 years later.

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My birth family’s full story was not a terrible one. It came very close to an all too frequent tragedy, and never was the clean, ever-rising American dream afterwards, but compared to where millions of other Americans end up, my parents led decent lives, and so did their kids, me included. The trip up that put my parent’s dream on a downward path was my dad’s own damn fault. He had many very incompatible business ideas and beliefs. In corporate America, he tried to be consistently straightforward, and helpfully honest. That has a tendency to backfire when you confront the big bosses about their malfeasance. Seems like there can be resentment when you raise difficult questions, and demand truthful answers from ginormous wankers. If dad would have just kept his mouth shut, and become a slimy greed grifter, we could have exulted in all the mammon imaginable. And I could have overdosed on cocaine at Studio 54 before my eighteenth birthday.

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That said, I am glad to be here, and then again not so much. I guess I am in a state of true ambivalence. Still being alive to write is great, but the topic of poverty is not dear to my heart. Something that shouldn’t occur in a land of plenty. Sadly, it does happen in a land of plutocrats. They are the human sleeves who deserve a proverbial wooden-pencil-parsed heart, although as a recalcitrant Van Helsing pacifist, I could almost never consider…