The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (22 page)

“Who are the poor?” conservative intellectual and onetime presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan asked in February 2012. “And in what squalor were America’s poor forced to live?” Then, quoting a Heritage Foundation study, he proceeded to answer his own questions: “Well, 99 percent had a refrigerator and stove, two-thirds had a plasma TV, a
DVD player and access to cable or satellite, 43 percent were on the Internet, half had a video game system like PlayStation or Xbox. Three-fourths of the poor had a car or truck, nine in 10 a microwave, 80 percent had air conditioning.” The sneering tone continued: It turned out, Buchanan wrote, that only in the “televised” version of poverty were masses of Americans homeless or hungry. In fact, Buchanan opined, in another example of a conservative quick to twist the language of Michael Harrington to his own ends, the crisis facing America was not one of poverty per se, but one triggered by a
culture
of poverty. That culture was epitomized by epidemic rates of illegitimacy, especially within Hispanic and Black communities; by high rates of drug use and school dropout rates among the poor; and by a propensity of the impoverished to get themselves incarcerated. “We have witnessed a headlong descent into social decomposition. The family, cinder block of society,” he concluded, “is disintegrating, and along with it, society itself.”
¹²

Some of the assumptions around this form of poverty may indeed be true—stereotypes, after all, frequently have some minimal basis in reality from which they balloon to cartoonish proportions. But that largely misses the point. Whatever the prognostications of a conservative think tank or a right-wing commentator, poverty on an epic scale
is
a reality in today’s America; and whether that poverty is caused by dysfunction, or the dysfunction is itself a product of the poverty, or, as is likely, the dysfunction and the poverty interact in ever more complex feedback loops, for the larger community to wash its hands of the problem represents an extraordinary failure of the moral imagination.

What should we do, for example, with someone like Emily, an elderly lady in Hawaii whose heritage consisted largely of violence, alcoholism, and abuse, and who had spent her life living in the shadow of these personal calamities?

My father, my grandfather, and my mom and all them were alcoholics. My dad beat on my mom; my brother-in-law beat on my
grandfather—my grandfather died of a blood clot in the back of his neck because my brother-in-law karate chopped him. My dad beat my mom all the time; had sex with her in front of people in a party—he didn’t care. And he beat me. I have cane knife scars; he beat me with a cane knife. My brothers beat me. One brother, a boxer, hang me up on a tree and beat me and left me there because I put a hole in his punching bag. He hung me in a tree and left me there. I got out. I was about eight years old; I washed myself up and looked at him and couldn’t do anything because I was a little girl. When I was 21 and pregnant with my first son, he come back at me. I picked up a rock. He said, “What are you going to do with that?” I said, “You call me Tiny, and this is my equalizer. So that way you’ll never, ever hit me again.” And he never hit me again. And none of my brothers hit me since then. I had to show them I’m not a little child, I’m a woman.

When Emily was a young child, her mother ran away from her father. “I was the only girl. We walked miles with my Dad. Me and my younger brother, we had to go every place he went. We slept between graves because he wanted to go drink. If we said anything, he knocked us out.”

Emily’s grandmother died when she was 9 years old, and, said Emily, she ran away from home. She spent the next several years bouncing between the residences of distant family members, foster homes, and the street. When she was 13, she recounted, sitting in her small plywood home on the edge of the rainforest, deep within the impoverished backwoods of the Puna District, on Hawaii’s Big Island, she was raped.

“I swore I would never raise my kids the way I was raised. I’ve never beat them. They’ve had spankings, yeah, when they got in trouble. But I never beat them. I had to change me. My foster mom told me, “To change you, you’ve got to be strong.’ I’m strong. I’m not afraid of anyone but God. No one else can change me.” Two of her children had steered clear of crime, and now had decent jobs.
But the other two—the oldest and the youngest—were frequently in trouble with the law.

Emily had worked many jobs over the years, including a half-decade stint working the guava fields of Hawaii, some time spent trimming cauliflowers in California, more time compounding and waxing cars on Maui, and a period collecting and recycling aluminum cans. At the same time, though, she never managed to save money; frequently spent what little she had on drugs, for kicks rather than out of any addictive craving, she said in explanation, perhaps somewhat optimistically; and for close to two decades had lived in a house the ceiling of which still had the holes that were poked in it by the mentally unstable previous occupant. Yes, by pretty much any measure Emily was somewhat dysfunctional, but do we as a society therefore wash our hands of her, denying her government assistance and pushing her ever further outside mainstream society’s boundaries?

Maybe. But if we do so, we have to be aware of the consequences: that a woman in her mid-sixties, a great-grandmother, who in recent years had been working to stay clear of drugs and to care for several generations of her family, would be rendered destitute. That because of that decision she will go from chronic poverty, living on a few hundred dollars a month in Social Security and a few hundred dollars’ worth of food stamps, to acute misery, from merely skimping on meals to actively missing them.

Or what should be done with Cruzanta Mercado and her longtime boyfriend Paul Abiley, also residents, far off the grid, of the dense tropical rainforest side of Hawaii’s Big Island?

It’s an extraordinarily beautiful part of the world, the lush green forest growing out of the highly fertile volcanic mud, except in the places where the lava flows have bubbled up out of the earth, creating miles-wide swaths of dead, black solidified lava fields. There, the rocks twist and turn, crack and knot like a mythical, hellish, austerely magnificent landscape—like an underworld such as that
toured by Virgil or Dante. In one spot or other, in this part of the island, molten rock is always flowing.

Yet the beauty hides a fair dollop of despair. Along the unmarked, unpaved, rutted back roads, meth labs proliferate. Stolen cars are stashed in the bush. Houses are frequently robbed by addicts. In response, homeowners keep large, fierce dogs on chains to deter the would-be invaders.

It was in this hinterland that Cruzanta and Paul had, literally, made their home—building a tiny Heath Robinson–type plywood cabin, on stilts above the forest, from planks, boards, and nails. The living area had room for a propane stove, a tiny wooden table—the chairs for which were stacked atop it when it was not in use—some shelves, and a few toys for their son, Ikaika, 3 years old when I visited the family in early 2012. Separated off from this room by a hanging blanket was a tiny bedroom, really a closet with a bed. Like Emily’s, theirs was a home without a toilet, without running water, without heating, without electricity. “We currently do not have any drywall in the house, no electric without our generator. You can see the framing—what’s holding up the walls. When we run out of gas, we use candles for our lighting, or maybe some battery lanterns,” Paul explained. “Other than that, we cook on our stove. When we run out of propane we make a grill outside, chop some wood. We take it like that, day by day. For the toilet, I have my uncle Ben, which is right across the street. Sometimes he’s not home; I have a commode—like a toilet for an elderly person. I put a trash bag in it, I do my thing, I dispose of my thing inside the trash. I bag up my trash and take it to the dump; that’s how I do my bathroom thing. I wash the dishes with rainwater.”

Bare bones as this house was, though, it represented their dreams, a step up in life from what came before. Both Cruzanta and Paul went to juvenile hall as teenagers—Cruzanta explained that her transgression was assaulting a girl at another school; Paul said that he ended up being incarcerated for drugs and other offenses. In fact,
Paul, who claimed that his family had a multigenerational problem with narcotics, had been in and out of trouble with the law since early in his teenage years. Grand theft auto, assault, drugs, he’d done them all, explained the young man, as he sat in his home, head shaved, arms heavily tattooed.

For a long while, the teenage couple, playing out a desperado story, lived out of an old car—one that Paul had acquired, on the black market, for $300. Cruzanta graduated high school, they recalled, with a touch of nostalgia, while living in the vehicle.

“I tried every day to fight my demons—which was using drugs,” Paul, who suffered from diabetes, acknowledged. “Because the pressure here is unreal, you know what I mean? When it’s in your face, it’s a different story from just saying you’re not going to do it. I had some back falls. I took ten steps forward, yet another twenty back. My mistakes, I needed to learn from them, because I was making the same mistakes over and over.”

Dysfunctional as their story sounded, however, the couple
were
committed parents to Ikaika, had worked hard—with help from the social workers at a Hawaii nonprofit named Neighborhood Place—to turn their lives around and to stay off of drugs, and had managed to eke out an existence for themselves, albeit one on the very margins of society. In the spring of 2012, both landed jobs at a local country club—he as a cart boy for the affluent golf crowd, she as a waitress. The work was part-time, paid just above minimum wage, and came with no benefits—but it was a start. “Right now, I don’t look at my job as a retiring position, what I’m doing, you know,” explained Paul. “But it does help, puts food on the table. I’m a cart boy; I wash carts, maintain the golf course, you know, take out the trash. I have a friend who gives me wisdom. He says, ‘Think of it as blocks, you can only go higher and higher. From your tower falling down many times before, you’re beyond that point; you know how to set your blocks—solid enough so that your foundation can rise.’ And that’s how I look at it.”

Cruzanta and Paul’s was, ultimately, a story that defied easy stereotyping. Neither were saints; and, on a bad day, both might be far, even, from averagely decent citizens. Yet both were trying to better their own lives and to create a home for their son. Not proffering help in such circumstances, based on the perceived moral flaws of the individuals concerned, is a striking example of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, since head-in-the-sand policies also often end up costing us all more down the road. Helping Cruzanta and Paul, with assistance in getting onto the power grid, for example, or with childcare for when they are both working at the country club, with continued access to food stamps and Medicaid, or with heating subsidies in winter, might well defray a heap of additional, messier expenses down the road, be they criminal justice bills, welfare costs, healthcare bills, or the monies spent on providing interventions to help a child whose family lives in deep poverty.

And the same holds true in myriad situations across the country. Take the story of Katie, in the depressed town of Nampa in Caldwell County, Idaho. As a kid, she recalled, her overworked mother and drunken father fed her raw turnips for dinner. “They would cut ’em up, sometimes cook ’em, sometimes they were raw. We didn’t have anything with them. And then we moved up to potatoes.” She laughed wryly at the memory. By the time she was 15 Katie had gotten pregnant, moved in with her meth-addicted, violent boyfriend, and dropped out of school. By the time she was in her twenties, she had herself developed a meth habit, had four children—three of whom ended up living with her own mother—and, while she had managed to leave her abusive boyfriend, in most other areas of her life she was a complete mess.

It would be easy to say that Katie had brought her poverty upon herself—although, clearly, the depressed, abusive environment in which she was raised had also helped push her down several wrong paths. It might even be easy, from a distance, to categorize the young woman as part of the “undeserving poor,” and to wash society’s hands
of responsibility for her well-being and for that of her children, to declare her ineligible for food stamps, to deny her children access to state-funded healthcare. But, as with Paul and Cruzanta, Katie, 28 when I met her, was struggling mightily to get her house in order. Three years earlier, she had gone into drug rehab; she had managed to kick her addiction and was now working as a staffer at a local community-organizing center—she liked the work, but all too often, when the center ran low on funds, she was temporarily laid off. She had remarried, this time to a man who had a job—stacking pallets at a local company—didn’t beat her, and never pushed drugs on her. They were trying to make a go of it; but the financial odds were against them. Neither one’s employment came with benefits. Neither had credit—which meant when they bought a secondhand car they ended up paying an exorbitant 29 percent interest rate. And if they weren’t renting a home owned by his grandfather, their repeated late payments on their rent would surely by now have landed them out on the streets.

Katie’s dreams were modest, yet like so many others in her position even these looked outlandish at times. “Ten, fifteen years from now I’m hoping to own our own home. Which would be nice,” she said, a short woman with an endearing, self-deprecating, smile, her mouse-brown hair falling down her shoulders. “And own a couple of vehicles. Having a full-time position. The American Dream, to me, it means to have a home and be happy; to not be living on the streets. Sober. To me it’s not having a bunch of money. I don’t think so. Being able to live and have food, and be happy. That would qualify to me.”