Okay, so I was in the grocery store very recently, behind a lady who bought a whole big load of groceries. Well, she was trying to buy them. She’d pick up a few items and watch as the cashier scanned them, check the total, hand a few more to the cashier, check the total, a few more. Finally, she was all done and she hands the cashier her credit card.
And, it won’t go through.
She’s standing there, a whole load of groceries and no way to pay for them. She discusses with the cashier how she’s going to go and get money and where can she pick up this cart full of groceries? Something about the way that she’s talking makes me believe that she won’t be back. That she’s having this conversation because it is just too painful to admit, even to herself, that she just doesn’t have the money to buy the food that they need. I find this extremely difficult to watch. I am embarrassed for her, embarrassed for her pre-teen son and feeling helpless. What can I do, what should I do?
It is painful.
It used to be me.
I know all too well that desperate feeling of how am I going to feed my kid?
How am I going to get myself out of this horrible situation without bursting into tears?
How did my life get to this point? This is NOT how I saw my life happening.
My ex-husband was an OUT OF CONTROL spender. I won’t go into all the details, suffice it to say that I still - nearly a decade later, with a fatter bank account, and a dependable 2nd husband - feel the panic when I go to the grocery store and I hand them my card. Please go through, please go through. I still carry around a check book in another bag “just in case.” I still grimace when I go to the mail box and my stomach still does the topsy-turvy whenever the phone rings and I don‘t recognize the number. Credit/Debit cards that refuse to go through, unpaid bills and bill collectors on the other end of the phone line still haunt me.
My sweet, caring hubby just doesn’t get this. He’s never been hungry poor, never had the lights go out because the bill wasn’t paid, never been terrified that he’d get sick ’cause there was no way to pay for it and no insurance to cover it, never DREADED Christmas because he had NO IDEA how he was going to buy his family presents. He’s never found himself dependent on the government and family to make it to the next paycheck. He’s never found himself the butt of callous people’s comments or had to endure their righteous disdain.
I have.
It's easy to have a harsh,
"Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,"
attitude if your own bootstraps
have always been exactly the right length.
I think that people like to think “This is America, everyone has the same opportunity to make something out of themselves.” (It makes them feel less guilt about the cushy middle-class lives that they live. And, I am also, now, one of those guilt-ridden upper middle-class people.) Not true. Some people’s foundations are so screwed up that they’ll spend a life-time caught in the mire of trauma. Not everyone is blessed with good genetics-bodies and brains that work- and people who love and support them.
No one WANTS to be poor or hungry or addicted or homeless.
And right here, is where I get really frustrated. I start to feel like a dog chasing my tail on this issue. Because, it is also true that life is not fair and you can’t make it be fair for everybody. To take away from one person because another person’s life was unfair is…unfair to the first person. My husband went to school for YEARS, he gets up everyday and goes to work and works hard, I went to school for years, I stay home and WORK. We shouldn’t feel guilty for being successful-we’ve both earned it.
I’ve been on both sides of this issue and the one thing that I do know is true is that there are no easy answers. And, anyone who says that they know the answers…well, that just tells me that they don’t really understand the questions. There are NO simple answers to complex problems.
The thing is that I know that even if I paid for that lady’s groceries, it probably won’t help the problem. The problem is probably bigger than one-time help. It was for me. The problem was my ex but it was also my refusal to deal with the problem of him. In fact, we once had very good friends who spent over $300 of 1990s money to buy us groceries and the whole time I was thinking, Don’t do this. You’re just making it more possible for him to NOT do what he should do. We’d have had enough, IF he’d have controlled his spending. Our friends were just hurting themselves trying to help us. And, that hurt me… and my pride.
It enabled me to stay in a bad situation longer, true, but it also showed me that I couldn‘t protect everybody else from his issues. I couldn’t internalize it all and continue to pretend everything was groovy when it wasn’t.
My experiences have left me much more left of right than I used to be. Politically, I find myself much closer to being “Independent” than anything else.
I’m closer to being Independent mainly because I am so frustrated with BOTH sides’ answers to these kinds of social issues:
Ignore It and Pretend Like It’s Not There
(- ie pull yourself up by your own bootstraps)
or
Throw Money At It
(-ie here, let me fix your problem for you)
- neither of these, by themselves, are viable solutions to complex problems.
There are lots of times when people take advantage of the system, no doubt. Sometimes, some people need a helping hand. They need not to be left on their own against a system that is bigger than any one person. Where would we all be without family? Without other people in our lives who care? Without an education? There are people in the world, who were born at the wrong time to the wrong people. And, have no foundation. None. They need help if they are to ever make it past “food stamp.”
And, some people need to teeter-totter on their own for a while until they learn to do it themselves.
And, there’s the crux. To know the difference, you have to know the person and the situation personally. You have to be involved.
(I’m not sure that giving to your church counts, if it did a lot of these problems would be smaller. I’ve been involved with a lot of churches and most of them are more focused on their next building project than the community that they live in.)
A handout, without love, will always be just a handout. I am not advocating against handouts. Some people really need them and should not be denied that help. I’m saying get involved. Know the people in your community. And, help where help is warranted. It’s going to take the individual person AND the government agency to get this done. It’s going to take creative, WISE answers to individual problems. We’re gonna have to work together-bipartisanship. What a concept!
You mean, we’re gonna have to stop treating politics like a competitive sporting event (“We win, you lose!”) and start working together?
Yep, that’s what I mean. Or, we all, in the end, lose.
(And, don't think for two seconds that I think I have all the answers, I'm still going round and round inside my own head about what, if anything, I should have done differently standing in line behind that woman in the grocery store.)
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