Intangible plusses to being poor, marginalized

Joe,

I have read your article, "Poor, White, and Pissed." I live in the same kind of town. I couldn't agree with you more! I want to ORGANIZE, as you suggested. (I tried to get a job with the DART Center, for example, and I've asked the DART Center for assistance.) Got any ideas how to go about this? The DART Center works extensively through the churches. My impression is that most of our local churches are basically country clubs -- with no swimming pool.

My impression is that what we need out here is an experienced organizer.

By the way, I do have to say that poor areas like ours have a sense of community and a spirit of mutual helpfulness that causes new residents to be positively blown away. I used to come home from work and find my neighbor standing in my kitchen, cooking dinner for my kids -- just one example out of many.

Also, there are some an intangible plusses to being poor and marginalized -- or, more exactly, to not being really part of Corporate America. This is hard to express, but my observation is that the privileged pay for their relative affluence by the almost total renunciation of any claim to individuality or inwardness -- that is, to any human qualities whatsoever. They are -- or at least must maintain the image of being -- merely soldiers. A soldier has no identity, individuality, or personal qualities, let alone personal eccentricities. A soldier's only value system is to loyally support the objectives and values of the entity that's writing his/her paycheck. A soldier is essentially a fighting machine. Corporate America's minions are fighting machines of another order. They live their lives in uniform. They examine nothing, think nothing, have only the prescribed views and opinions. And there is a demand placed on them that they be neither more nor less than soldier/machine -- at least not visibly, even in their personal lives. Your really successful people internalize these roles, to the destruction of all the human qualities above, all the way to their center of "inwardness."

Where I live, the prevalent "type" is the direct opposite of the soldier/machine. Nowadays, you must be either soldier or outlaw. It's not hard to be an outlaw; you need do nothing more than wear white socks with your business suit, have a pet goose, or be skeptical of the medical establishment. In my neck of the woods, people are so poor and marginalized that they have no idea of the values of the larger society they are mostly unaware they are supposed to be conforming to. They are allowed to be who they are--by the local people, at least, while too readily accepting the role the larger society has cast them in: Outlaw.

(That would be the identity they are most likely to internalize.) Yet they are authentic human beings. True, they may throw pumpkins at passing speeders. But at least they are still people, and not machines (except often in working life).

We seem to have reached a point where people have no conception of the individual as a kind of flowering of the rare and exotic -- a flowering that may feature thorns, or that may be too rampagious or too strange.

We've lost our delight in human uniqueness ("diversity" would perhaps be the more PC word).

A lot of people in America are "losers" simply because the soldier mentality is inconcievable to them. They are bursting with outlawed human qualities. In a corporate setting, even in the right suit, they would be out the door the first time they opened their mouths. Their loyalties are to life, rather than to the corporate machine. They will check on their neighbor who lives in a camper trailer, in winter, to make sure she's all right.

Sure, she's an old drunk lady, but they like her. They will defend her when the city tries to remove her from her home. They will patch her roof for her. They will take in the old Montana cowboy friend, who now has pancreatic cancer. They will share tools and firewood, and gossip -- and food and cigarettes, if need be. They like the lady who throws pumpkins, too. They will explain the finer points of chainsaws to the single mom who got her chain on backwards.

Hey, you're supposed to be allowed to be a fully developed human being! That means you're allowed not merely the good qualities of being a thoughtful, compassionate person who thinks, but also the full flowering of your native insanity.

I think there's a book in here somewhere. All those people who aren't poor, white, and pissed, have given up far more than we have.

Sharon