I’ve been in a technical training all week, and the guy sitting next to me is from Alaska. He flew down here specifically for the training, and because his family is in Portland. I call him a kid, which says more about my age than it does his: he’s in his late 20s, maybe, early 30s. Bright guy, knows his stuff, quick-thinker.
I have a few hobbies, but one of them is politics. I follow national and local politics, and I unabashedly lean left. And this week, after the tragic shooting in Tucson, I’ve been kinda dying to rant about the politics of hate, and assassination, and mental health issues, and gun control. All the issues that are brought up around Jared Loughner’s assault on Rep. Gabby Giffords and bystanders. But being in this training, among strangers, I have held back.
In fact, my friend and co-worker, Ken, is in my training, too, and he’s politically very similar to me. He’s the one I would rant to, normally. So during lunch breaks and in the evenings, Ken and I have spoken in brief details about the events last weekend. But not in class.
I have wondered what politics our classmate from Alaska has. I’ll call him Damon. I suspect that Alaska is fairly conservative, and of course they elected Sarah Palin to the Governorship. But I realize that’s generalizing; individuals are just that.
Today, during a break in the class, we started talking about the work environments we come from. Damon has often mentioned the CEO and executives at his job, which led me to believe he’s from a private company. But as he described it in further detail, today, it’s more like a state agency, providing low-cost housing for people in need. But it’s an odd hybrid; a for-profit company, run as a business, taking tax money but returning some of that money to the state. Apparently the directors of the business are appointed by a state board.
I’m not sure I understand it. It skirts the line of ethics for me; they’re making money from regulating whether poor folks have a roof over their head? That sounds almost as bad as middlemen making money by intervening between patients and doctors. Oh… wait. That’s the American way.
I’m already getting worked up and I haven’t even reached the part of the story that sparked my interest. As Ken, Damon and I spoke, Damon described what, to him, was a common situation: people would come in to their offices, apply for housing assistance, and, on paper, meet the state standards for getting discounted housing, or help with their mortgages. And then, in Damon’s words, they’d walk out and get into a $60,000 SUV.
Damon spoke carefully. He knew enough to know that you can never tell how someone else will respond to a value judgement. He was probing, trying to see if these two strangers shared his view. How outrageous that someone would spend so much money on a car and then claim they couldn’t pay a mortgage. “I think a house is more important than a car,” he said, and his tone suggested that he disapproved of their choice, though carefully, carefully. He was holding back his full anger. I got the impression that if he were having this conversation at home, among friends, he’d be much louder and use far different words.
I immediately disagreed. In my head.
I thought about the recent stories, lots and lots of them, of banks foreclosing on houses whose owners were caught up on their mortgages. There are even tales of banks foreclosing when there was no evidence that the bank in question even held the paper. Or, worse, on houses where, and I am not shitting you, there was no mortgage at all.
And these were the banks who have received billions in money in overt attempts to prop up their failing business model (to say nothing of the billions in tax breaks and covert assistance our government leaders have given them over the years).
Damon described the people getting housing assistance as drug abusers. He said they were bad with money. I saw them as people struggling with addiction. People who have not led privileged lives.
Just because some guy is driving a fancy car doesn’t mean he isn’t up to his ears in debt. He may be weeks, or days, from a repossession. Or maybe he’s barely hung on to the SUV because Americans see their car as an extension of their manhood; a defining characteristic.
Who cares? Who am I to judge? It doesn’t hurt me and it doesn’t hurt Damon.
Damon saw them as unworthy of financial help. I saw them as worthy of pity.
I didn’t want to get mad. I wanted to make a difference, and maybe give Damon a different view. I bet Damon doesn’t deny that his bosses deserve a house, or the salary – though to be fair, I don’t know. Maybe he thinks they deserve less than they have, too. Maybe he resents both ends of the unjust class scale we’ve built in America.
What I said, then, was just this: “Yeah, but even so, what’s the worse that can happen? They get a roof over their head.”
He struggled a bit to explain that it wasn’t just him, that it was the tax money being misused that was the principle of the thing. Instead of pressing my argument, though, I shut up. I could feel myself getting angrier and I wanted to stop before I got too worked up.
Ken jumped in, though, and argued that although there’s a common image of the “welfare mom with all the kids” getting money they shouldn’t, it’s probably a very small percentage of the whole. A decent reminder, to be sure.
I’ll tell you who it hurts: it hurts the managers and executives at Damon’s job. But I can guarantee you that those assholes aren’t in danger of losing their homes over it. It’s just a bonus to them.
I would go farther: who cares? Why shouldn’t someone have a roof over their head? If they can’t afford it, who is it hurting? What does it take away from anyone else if someone who burdened themselves with kids and poor choice of a spouse, someone at the ass end of society, has a house?
Everyone deserves a home. Everyone. Who the fuck cares if they can’t “afford” it, or they aren’t the right people, or don’t have a job? Why does some other rich fucker get to collect bonuses based on how many, or more probably, how few, poor folks they help out? Everyone deserves health care. Everyone deserves decent healthy food to eat. These are all things we can make happen.
But instead America has decided that the poor have to earn their way, and if they’re not trying hard enough, that it’s because they must be lazy. But the top of the financial heap can’t be forced to pay into the system in the form of slightly higher taxes. The top of the heap can ignore the laws on theft because it’s glossed with a coating of legal language: “mortgage” and “foreclosure” and “eviction”. The top of the heap deserve to look down on the rest of us.
I suspect Damon is a lot like most of my fellow citizens. More’s the pity. I think everyone deserves a house, but if I had to kick someone out, it wouldn’t be the meth’ed out girl with babies who can’t keep a job. I want her to have a house; I want her to get medical care. It’s the only chance she has to get a handle on her condition.
No, the bastards I’d kick out of their McMansions are the rich motherfuckers who run highly profitable businesses that deny health care or houses to others. Let’s see how those assholes do living in the streets.
