Hey Joe,
Your recent letter from the noodle guy reminded me of how vicious is the cycle of poverty in this country. I worked for years with delinquent kids and their families, later with families in child welfare. In the absence of pure evil, the driving force in much of what brought those folks into the system was poverty.
Sometimes that poverty was the result of drug use or a mental illness, but more often it was the result of no help in life, ever. I don't mean government help, I mean the kind of help that each of us ought to have as children. It would be lovely if we all had caring, nurturing, functional, productive parents, but we don't. For many people brought up in the absence of those things, just getting the basic foundation for a successful life is a monumental struggle: poor protein intake in infancy can harm the brain, an environment without enrichment limits development, a rigid school structure applied to a child who's maybe never had structure is a recipe for disaster.
More than anything, I detest this up-by-the-bootstraps mentality that has afflicted us in this nation. It's as if there is no excuse for the failure to become a captain of industry except an internal deficiency. You mentioned this in Deer Hunting with Jesus, that the folks in West Virginia have internalized and personalized their failure and lack of success.
It's crap. It's a myth and it keeps us all beating up on ourselves or fighting each other for the last scrap on the table. The entire system from start to finish is set up to maintain the status quo. Your particular status quo is based, more than anything, upon birth. My great good fortune was to be born into a family that was financially stable and placed a high value on education. I could have been born to the single parent with no education, the one who struggled with depression and had no family support, had difficulty keeping a job. My life would have been vastly different. I did nothing to deserve this great good fortune.
The thing that irks me so about the conservative thugs running this country is that they want to assign some moral value based on circumstances of birth. Because I do well, it means I'm a better person. It's such a crock. The little soul that I am could just as easily have been born in the Sudan where I may have begun starving while still in utero. I don't know why it's so hard for folks to accept that we are, each of us, more than anything, living lives based on luck or the lack of it, or the luck of our ancestors, or the lack thereof.
That being the case, it is incumbent upon those of us who are luckier by birth to turn around and help those who weren't so blessed. Isn't that the essence of the belief system this nation was allegedly built upon? I don't think Jesus even wore boots, and I seriously doubt he'd be so dismissive of the vast majority of the world's citizens who are barefoot and wouldn't know a boot if it hit them between the eyes.
Please keep doing what you're doing. The world needs voices of reason.
Barbara
Tulsa, Oklahoma
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Barbara,
You wrote: "I don't know why it's so hard for folks to accept that we are, each of us, more than anything, living lives based on luck or the lack of it, or the luck of our ancestors, or the lack thereof."
The marriage of morality with wealth production is older than our constitutional republic. When the first colonists arrived in the American colonies, they arrived as part of a joint stock venture by English or Dutch investors. They were obligated to produce a profit for those investors, and the sense of one's individual worth was immediately tied to productive capability by the leadership, designated by the investors or royalty. The church joined forces with the investment capitalists to attach a moral value to productiveness. It was a holistic capital venture, morally and physically.
Of course we have history books that never mention this, and instead tell us about freedom loving religious dissenters, etc. But the fact was that, dissenters or not, they didn't come here and simply pick out a piece of dirt, settle it and prosper through rugged independence. They got land indirectly through or from royalty or others who had been granted huge tracts, with the idea of developing commerce by management of human beings.
Anyway, morality and goods and prosperity, sure signs of God's approval, have been linked in this nation since the beginning. Anyone who fails to prosper is deficient in either effort, or in God's eyes, both of which are the same. I don't think most Americans understand the underpinnings of their cruel attitude toward the less fortunate, people with, as you say, bad luck. As a result of our beginnings, many Americans, though not at all religious, still hold this attitude as a cultural result of the nature of our founding.
Of course in a system like that the poor are bound to have more bad luck. Good fortune in life costs money to propagate -- usually over generations through education, material investments, and so forth.
Here's what scares the hell out of me these days. The bad luck, misfortune and ignorance of the poor has itself become a resource for wealth generation for more fortunate groups and individuals. Not just the bad luck of blacks and minorities, but my own working poor redneck people too.
Let me tell you a story that at first seems to veer off the topic a bit -- I'd call the subject of sex offenders veering off the topic, but I'm using your letter as an excuse to tell a story I've wanted to tell for months -- but makes your point in the end.
It's about my neighbor and buddy, Stokes, a 66-year-old guy with a gray ponytail, an altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to invite comparison). Six years ago he got caught by police in a, shall we say, "a vehicular sexual incident" with a married woman. They were both drunk, big deal. That happens in beer joints. But when they went to court the lady's lawyer advised her to say it was against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of problems for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex offender while his public defender all but slept through the trial.
To make matters worse, Stokes had an unregistered handgun stashed in his car. Stupid, I know, but rednecks are often like that, and I'd be willing to bet there are more unregistered guns than registered guns around here. This may horrify urban liberals, but legal or not, it is the common practice of tens of thousands of people down here in the southern climes of our great nation. Not to mention common nationwide to many thousands more cab drivers, night clerks, hotel parking valets, bill collectors, repo men, single women and god only knows how many others. To make a long story short, thanks to the gun which he never touched, Stokes was prosecuted for armed abduction for sexual purposes, and did five years.
He is out now, but released into an entirely different world than he left -- one which seems scripted by Uncle Joe Stalin, Adam Smith and Hanging Judge Roy Bean. As a convicted felon, he has been sentenced to be a profit center for our economy. In fact, he has been one from the day he was charged, and continues to be.
First off, he was a profit center for the privatized prison where he served his time. Now it is fairly common knowledge that America's burgeoning system of privatized prisons, "super jails," and related services has been a boon for corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp.) and their investors. Prisoner leasing programs such as Florida's which rents out prison labor for less than 50 cents an hour to private industry in the name of "job training," make building more prisons an attractive option for state governments. It also makes recidivism desirable, since it assures the prison labor pool. Somewhere between 1% and 2% of Americans are behind bars, locked up at any given time, and as many more on probation or under state monitoring, obviously capitalist style punishment is a solid financial investment.
Convictions are profitable and the more of them there are the more money both private interests and the state take in. But throw in the term sex offender and get on the registered sex offender list (which seems to be mostly filled with Johns who solicited prostitutes, though you'd never know it by the way they name the offense) and it all gets really strange. This is partly because of the taboo and stigma associated, but mostly for the bizarre monitoring rules, and the profitability of enforcement. For example Stokes, must pay a couple hundred a month for counseling and group therapy until they tell him he can stop doing so. This therapy mainly amounts to listening to the stories of more serious offenders such as child molesters even though he is not one, but being treated by law as if he were. Such is the fate of being shackled by law to any of dozens of types of "certified sex offender treatment providers," an ever expanding industry they tell me.
He also must pay for registration as an offender, blood, saliva, fingerprints, palm prints, police registration of his internet address (within 30 minutes of obtaining it) and so on with the Department of State Police and the Sex Offenders Registry, providing a new photo, address, etc., for 10 years, effectively the rest of his life, not to mention registering with the local cops wherever he lives. After five years he may petition the court for relief from having to re-register monthly. He cannot leave the state. He has to inform employers of his status as a sex offender. So he cannot get a normal job and subsists on handyman work. In the end he generates about $400 a month for one entity or another, whether he has a job or not.
Stokes's designated handlers tell him that the system would smile upon him if he would get more formal 8-5 employment, something that could be more easily tracked and taxed. Would that it were so easy for a 66-year-old man in poor health. So he replies, "I'm retired dammit. I got the same right to live on my social security, if I can manage to, as anyone else."
Well, yes, but it's not much of a life for someone who has worked a skilled union job setting up lights and stage in large arenas and performance venues. Now he lives in a basement workshop of an overcrowded apartment building/rooming house, a space that is supposed to pass for an apartment but doesn't even come close. For that privilege he pays $600 a month, and is allowed to work off part of it off by the landlord as a handyman.
Stokes tells me he could get out from under much of this by, and here's the legal wording, "satisfying the court's criteria for clear and convincing evidence that due to his physical condition the person no longer poses a menace to the health and safety of others."
"Well, you could cut your dick off," I suggested.
"Sometimes I wish I had," he sighs.
Late at night through my window by the computer I can see Stokes bicycling at 10 pm to the local convenience store to buy groceries.
Not only is that an expensive way to feed one's self, but it is practically the only way for old Stokes to cop some grubs without getting thrown in jail. Seriously. As a convicted sex offender, he is not allowed to come in proximity with young women in a supermarket checkout line. Nor is he allowed to visit a park, or even his own grandchild, even though he is not a child molester by the court's own admission. He is not allowed to drink a beer. In fact, he is not even allowed to read Playboy Magazine.
In any case, I am pretty dammed convinced it's a racket, just like incarceration has become a racket, just as everything in this whole goddamned country is a racket in disguise. At this writing there are supposed to be 117 registered sex offenders in this burg of 24,000 from which I write, Winchester, Virginia, yet only 61 in the surrounding county which has a population of 73,000. Let me make a wild speculation here and say there may be a difference in the way justice is administered in the two localities.
We started out talking about bad luck and the luck of the poor, so I’ll end with one last example from Stokes. As if his story needed any more bad luck. He came upon a rather large black female mutt recently, who looked like she had a little retriever in her, according to Stokes, though I could never see it. She was bone skinny and being neglected and abused by an old alcoholic woman down the street.
Well, that dog, named Beulah, just loved Stokes. He lovingly fed her, even cooked for her and she stayed by his side constantly and obediently. But she kept getting skinnier and skinnier no matter how much he fed her. For a while we speculated it was worms, but I've seen enough dogs to know something worse was at work. And Stokes surely did not have $150 for a vet and tests. So Stokes bums a ride with a friend and takes Beulah over to the Humane Society to see if he can get some help. An examination showed that Beulah had diabetes. Whereupon Stokes was charged with animal abuse by the animal control office of our city police department. "You should never have let that dog get in this condition, you should have taken her to a veterinarian!"
Now Stokes has a court appearance on the docket for animal cruelty. And of course no money for a real lawyer. So he's gonna defend himself. A conviction will send him back to jail, where he will once more be a profit center, and when released will once more start the expensive cycle of life that follows incarceration.
I hold middle class America responsible for this deformed thing we now call justice. And I've wanted to write an article about the sex abuse crime industry scam in this country, and proposed it to several magazines. Every one of them said that sex abusers are too unsympathetic as characters for them to publish. I pointed out that these are real people, not characters in a fictional work. The editors added that they were afraid the public might mistake such a story as being supportive of real sex offenders.
But hold on …
Honest to God, as I conclude writing this -- and I swear on a stack of friggin Bibles -- a police prowl car and two of the department's animal control officers in a police truck just parked in front of Stokes' place across my driveway. They get out and after rifling through some papers on a clipboard and talking on cell phones.
Now they have walked over to Stokes' back door. He comes out and they sit him down in a lawn chair while they stand over him, hands on hips, lips moving, wearing dark sunglasses. And the neighbors are all peeking out their blinds, watching the cops accost the registered sex offender (once he was on the internet registry, word got around here fast). They are probably looking at the animal control officers' truck and thinking: "Oh my gawd! Bestiality too?)
Anyway you look at it, this cannot be good. Not for Stokes, not for you or me or anyone else less than enamored with the idea of a police state.
As Stokes told me only yesterday, "I'm a goddamned magnet for bad luck."
No he's not. He's just one more anonymous human profit center in a grotesque system that has no mercy.
In art and labor,
Joe
