I saw a thing on PBS last night about Socrates and how he used to go up to random people on the street and ask them questions. I like that idea. I think a big part of the differences between people lie in the way we define things. So I am starting a little Socratic round of questioning today.

What

I know, it’s election season. It’s all anyone wants to talk about. But I am bored to tears talking and fighting over politicians who could give a flying fuck about the people they are supposed to represent. So i am writing about something that is a bit more immediate.

You might be under the impression that we live in a first world country. For a lot of people, that is true. For others, the crushing poverty of less “developed” nations are daily realities. You may even intellectually understand that poverty exists in this country. But knowing a thing and understanding a thing are very different things.

The first thing you should understand about poverty is that being poor means you will be investigated. Your bank records, medical records, employment records, etc. all become open to the government. You sign away any rights to privacy when you ask for help. And you will continue to be investigated, as long as you get a single dollar in assistance. You will fill out the same forms with the same questions for various agencies, all of which will have a rules sheet telling you how you will be a criminal if you misrepresent yourself and exactly how many days you have to submit new forms for every tiny change in your life. Did you get a 10 cent raise at your job? Did a boyfriend move into your home? Did someone buy you a gift or give cash? The strict rules put in place make it nearly impossible to live as a poor person without becoming a criminal of some sort. That $100 some family member might have given you for phone bill better be reported so they can appropriately doc your food stamp allotment for the next month. $100 to keep the phone on means an extra week without groceries, if you follow the rules.

And you never fill these forms out just once. You fill them out over and over and over and over. You bring proof of income. 2 months worth of pay stubs, 6 months, bank statements, letters from those family members stating that the $100 was actually a loan and not a gift so you don’t lose your food stamps. They check with your job. Regularly. It is difficult to have the Welfare office constantly bothering your boss about how many hours you work each week, and then having the Housing Authority do the same. Can you imagine your boss being bothered by a Welfare caseworker every time your hours change? There is more than a little bit of fear that even though your boss knows that you make poverty level wages, that they will be miffed by the constant harassment of those agencies that are supposed to fill in the gaps left by your tiny paycheck.

It is not unlike living in a totalitarian state.

Just a few of the things that I have to fill out the same information for are: Welfare/Tanf, Food Stamps, Medicaid, Housing, Utility Assistance, Childcare, Free Lunches for the Kid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Different agencies (or different departments in the same agency) all getting pretty much the same info. And with the exception of the tax credit, I have to fill these things out a minimum of 4 times per year for each service.

If I were rich, I could also apply for help from the government. It would be called a tax break. I would fill it out once per year at the same time and with the same information that the government already has. But I’m not rich, therefore I must submit to a much more thorough investigation, and I must do it more often.

For a lot of bureaucratic things in this country, we have a pretty decent system down. Standing in line at the DMV is no ones idea of fun, but you can be fairly sure that baring something really atrocious you will get your driver’s license in a timely fashion. Same is true of passports and usually tax returns. But for poor people those things often don’t go as smoothly (Georgia, IIRC, can suspend your license if your insurance cancels you. And insurance companies send copies of their letters of cancellation to the DMV- so you can effectively not own a car and not need insurance and have your license taken away from you). Poor people are much more likely to be audited by the IRS. My mom once explained that little factiod (she was an accountant and took more than a few organizations through auditing) by telling me the IRS just doesn’t believe people can live on that little. And yet nearly 20 million Americans live below the poverty line.

So I may join with you in the chorus of screaming about Telecom immunity and medical records privacy, but the truth is that the government already has all of my medical records. And financial records. And employment history. And so on. In more detail than you think is possible .

One of the weird aspects of becoming homeless and having to rely on the kindness of friends is that the kid and I have been in much swankier neighborhoods than we used to be. It is a bit like moving to a foreign city though in reality we are less than 5 miles from where we started.

Things are green here. Old houses are kept up. Gardens grow. Kids play outside. Actual kids, actually playing. It is something that struck me when we first moved to the Central District a few years ago, how few children there seemed to be. Sure there were plenty of teenagers acting much older and tougher than they should, but seeing little kids in parks and on bicycles was not a daily happening.

I have to wonder how much the constant threat of violence wore on us, on our neighbors, on their kids. Would I have become so depressed and housebound if I wasn’t constantly afraid, not of some big attack (though I was certainly afraid of those for the kid) but of the tiny bits of daily verbal violence and threats of physical harm. Every trip to the store or to work became akin to running a gauntlet and hoping that today I wouldn’t get hassled.

Safety is a privilege. We buy it with our zip codes. We turn the threat of violence that accompanies poverty into a an “other”. We give it shape in a dark skinned man with baggy pants, though I bet that same man wants safety too. He’s finding it the only way he can when there are no dear friends in nice green neighborhoods to run to.

Women will understand this. We live with the daily, back of the mind kind of fear of rape. Unless you’re traumatized, it doesn’t turn into something that is exactly crippling, it’s more like a chronic cough you can’t get rid of, this fear of violence. In poor neighborhoods, it’s not just women (though we get a double dose) who are afflicted.

I wonder how much damage I’ve done to my son by leaving him in such an oppressive place for so long. I wonder how to fix those who are still there. How to make sure that they can get the openness and freedom that just having enough money to live on brings.

(I’ve been reading Elizabeth Gaskell lately. She’s my new favorite Victorian writer. So if my writing has turned a bit flowery and prosy- blame her).

While running my eyes thru leftbloggistan I noticed something I haven’t seen in 4 years: leftie blindness and wishful thinking coupled with utter ignorance to the facts who disagree with their pinkie colored reality view.

1. “Troopergate”? seriously? she wanted to fire a guy who tasered her nephew and made death threats to her father, not to mention being a wife beater. GO ahead democrats, defend a wifebeater. Just do it. Then allow the republicans to run you into he goud by discussing real abuse of power, like Obama asking the state for money for Rezko.

2. Her daughter? Convenient how everyone ignores that Palin is pro contraception, not to mention that her daughter is 17 and thus entitled to her own choices. Or are you guys telling us that she can’t possibly be making a choice if we don’t like the choice? Morons!

3. McCain receives benefits plus a veteran pension and disability? Horrible guy that he is… why that’s almost as Joe Biden spending 1000 dolars a week from the taxpayer’s money to fly to and fro Delaware. Right?

4. Palin wasn’t vetted? She sure has a lot less skeletons than Obama doesn’t she?

5. Palin is irrelevant? Tell that to the polsters that have Obama not only lacking the much expected convention bump, but also the headlines his shitty speech was bound to have.

Wake up and smell the coffee: one of the parties has disaffected unhappy members likely to stay home or vote third party. After 8 fucking years of republican rule and against McCain of all people and Obama fails to have a lead bigger than the margin of error?

Say it after me, President McCain. The Obama campaign, the morons in the DNC backing Obama and the idiot sheeple following their lead have brought you this. I hope McCain thanks them in his inauguration speech.

In the beginning, this was called The White Papers. It started from a comment made by a former blogger here who was a friend in real life. We were talking about healthcare and I said i had been turning the problem over in my head for so long I could write a white paper on it. He said “then why don’t you?”

Well it turns out that I am more of a pamphleteer than a wonk writer. Much like with fiction, I get bored out of my skull about 20 pages into writing anything. But I still love me some political theory.I mean love.

Ruth, a mathematician, and i were talking about the different ways we learn things. She sees things from their smallest parts up. I see them as a whole and then tear them apart. The best way I can describe it is that the Kid was talking to us about how there is a mathematical way to take a solid sphere, cut it into small pieces, then rearrange the pieces so you get a much larger sphere. Immediately in my head there was a sphere getting blown to bits, twirling about and rearranging itself like a 3d puzzle. Ruth saw it as a graph and started talking about line segments. Neither of our methods were wrong, and we could both get to the same result.

So I am thinking about the different ways that we see problems and solutions and how to overcome my boredom at writing more than 20 pages on a single topic. I am also thinking about how fucking awesomely democratic the internet is and what a wonderful thing that Wikipedia exists.

I am also thinking that maybe all my struggles to do things the established way is a complete load of shit (for me anyways). I’ve never been happy doing things in the order I was “supposed” to do them. See- having a child at 19 and refusing to marry his father (or any of the other perfectly respectable men who came after).

And somewhere in this mess of thoughts I also need to find a way to support my kid and myself. Theory is all well and good, but I can’t feed the kid a theory sandwich or tuck him into a theory bed at night. There must be a way to do the things I want to do while obtaining the things I need. I just don’t know how yet.

More proof our government isn’t doing its basic job of protecting the people is the atrocious way we “help” poor, brown people during natural disasters.

Via BFP comes links to get real help to low income WOC in New Orleans right now.

Kate Harding has some quotes from people who can’t evacuate the city.

And Redstar brings us the Katrina pain index.

If I was a praying person, I’d have my eyes shut tight for the residents of the gulf coast as well as those already hit in the Caribbean. My thoughts are with them regardless.