[529] 6 Deadly Sins

I saw a model for social mobility in a sociology class once. It explained that, relative to where you were born in life, maybe 10-15% of people were predicted to move up in their class. If my memory is lacking, I know it wasn’t 5% and I know it wasn’t 20%. It referred to the U.S. specifically, and I’m fairly certain it was speaking to how that number goes down depending on race and how those numbers have been affected as we moved into the future. (This was 6 years ago I was in this class.)

A word employed, I think too often today, is “privilege.” One must check their privilege. They must apologize and kowtow to the unconscious hurt it causes everyone around them. There is no hard and fast rules for believing someone has acted with enough contrition. The standard for what constitutes privilege is constantly shifting. It’s less a cautionary vehicle for awareness as it is an opportunity for someone to pounce on what they perceive is any edge they were not provided.

Here we can find ourselves in another conversation about “raising consciousness” or claim some capacity to be “woke.” In my view, to do either is as much a sham as it is to foist someone’s life circumstances on their unconscious biases alone. Let’s elaborate with some stories.

I recently took a trip to the ghetto. A friend of mine organizes his uncle’s pills, runs him to the store, and just generally checks in to make sure the aging former Gangster Disciple diabetic is still kicking. The man’s grass was a jungle, he smelled like unwiped ass. He told, more like barely coherently mumbled, stories about how crackheads (or, rock stars as he hilariously called them) sneak into his house to do crack while he’s asleep. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has a few mental health issues as well.

We can draw a contrast from that man’s experience of life to that of his nephew’s and mine. Me and my friend live within 5 minutes of each other and both grew up solidly middle class. The quiet, quasi-dead, banality of the neighborhood in which I’m writing this was something we were both born into. We’re both “woke” to the realities of poverty, him in his own family, and if only me because I’ve known him for so long, or watched what’s happened to my area as ghetto-like conditions started creeping in.

The dialogue about his uncle goes a few ways. Screaming accusations and appeals to personal responsibility happens often enough. “He should mow his lawn!” “Lock the door!” “Seek help!” Because the man “shopping,” at a store that doesn’t mop its floors, for pop to accompany the bread and leftover cake on his table, probably has a world-class health clinic up the street, right? You remember it was us that drove him to the store as well as sort out the 8 different pills he needed a day.

You can also go completely oblivious the other way. “He should be totally taken care of!” “We should create all the resources possible to make sure he’s living like a human being!” “If we only had access to better healthcare!” While my sympathies certainly lie more in this camp, it’s wholly oblivious to the realities of an impoverished culture. There is no plug and play fix to an institutional disposition. There is no amount of “education.” There’s not enough health clinics you can open. There’s not enough empathy bombs you can set off in someone’s mind to provoke a march and overhaul. In an extremely important wording and sense, “he” cannot be fixed because “he” is not really the problem. Many things went wrong before he got here.

It’s this reality that makes me, not want to blame and berate people of my or higher standing about their lives, but encourage them to talk. It’s why I wish they’d get over themselves. Without even realizing it, we’re quick to cry, kick, and scream about things that happen to us. (My future was tied to the girl!) More importantly to me, we’re quick to brag and boast about how picturesque our lives are, when of course they’re not, while we spend everyday pretending the realities of the ghetto don’t matter or impact us. We act like the institutions we middle-manage or wage-slave at don’t create conditions of a chronic illness. We think working hard, or more insidiously, “harder,” means we’re being smart or justified. We’re not.

This is what kills me whenever I’m told, “well we already know this!” about something I’m writing. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe the vast majority of people who grew up like me know the feeling, look, and smell of poverty. I don’t think they’re regaled with stories from their Uncle Tom grandpa getting soooo excited to be treated like white people. I think this because I’ve had people tell me, “I’ve had many racial interactions throughout my life!” trying to defend their not-racist street cred, as they doubted the legitimacy of Black Lives Matter or that the amount of people getting shot was accurate.

Do you know? Do you feel things in your bones and change your voice and actions?

Recently, I was watching a former NFL star talk on Chelsea about what a major payday looks like to you, as opposed to Uncle Sam, as opposed to your agent or your family. Managing that money and having those difficult conversations about why you’re not going to let someone invest in a barber shop in Tokyo are skills you don’t often acquire on your road through the sports world. It’s a kind of clash of civilizations in your own mind, as you often come up from less than ideal circumstances. For many of these guys, it takes losing millions before a stabilizing and wiser perspective sets in.

In other words, you can’t just throw money at it. If you’re going to my friend’s uncle’s house, you shouldn’t even bother keeping ten bucks in your pocket, or you’re gonna be compelled to lie to him when he asks if you have any extra cash. The kinds of changes that I would argue for aren’t simple shifts in monetary policy. They’re shifts in what we’re willing to put up with conversationally. They’re shifts in what constitutes “work” or a well-written or reported perspective on some area of life. I want humility and struggle against the system, not braggadocio and tired confessionals mirroring every other complacent or self-indulgent soul.

But how do you know I mean it? What makes me “special?” Why listen to my voice, sounding eerily like those bleeding hearts with pie-in-the-sky ideas that could never work!?

Well, I’m the one writing about my brush with actual poverty, you’re not. I’m currently looking for a spot to build an eco-friendly straw-bale house, because I didn’t get the “middle-class” lifestyle promised to me either. That’s currently, not “one day” after I’ve exhausted myself at some bullshit job, I very-well know is bullshit, but refuse to say so out loud because it’s so drab and depressing, blaaaahhh. “Not everyone can do drug studies, asshole!” No, but you can pull resources. You can shack up next or near each other and put away resentful naiveties about the capacity of your bootstraps. My living room and extra bedroom have opened up for at least 4 friends to help find their footing. You can try figuring out something new together instead of playing out the well-worn excuses and traversing the poorly-paved roads before you.

A sonder is the realization that everyone has a life as rich and complex as your own. I often think about this as I’m passing what feels like a hundred thousand cars on my way to take pills for more than most will make this month. Rich and complex? We’re all on the same road. In my area, we’re all wandering the same mall and eating the same food. We went to, about, the same schools. If we truly had any capacity for appreciating complexities, you’d think we’d introduce “simple” ethics regarding shared experience into the compounding equation before anything else.

Still, I’m provoked by the language of sin. We’re greedy. I want my toys and house and cash as much as the next person, but I won’t do it hiding behind my small donations here and there or even pretending blogs like this count for more than they do. We’re sloths. We’ll struggle to the ends of the earth to defend our “love” and our “rights” as long as we don’t really have to tackle what that means for our neighbor. We take undue pride in what I AND I ALONE, or at least, what my family nodded in support of, have accomplished. We envy those who can pull off the best Instagram picture or magazine depiction of a modern living room. We gorge ourselves on unsustainable food. We get insanely defensive and angry at people like me who perpetually point out the emperor is naked. When it comes to lust, I think people should be fucking considerably more often, so let’s say I think religion gets that one pretty wrong at least.

Everything in my life is a first-world problem and complaint. I barely discussed what happens in the ghettos of America. Tell that story to the perpetually bombed teenage Palestinians. You mean their house ISN’T reduced to rubble? Bling Bling! I don’t want to live like the poor and I don’t think I need to flog myself for aspiring to more. I do think I have an obligation to encourage, as often as the mood strikes me, a conversation that I think begets real change. I want the kind of conversations that drove me to drug studies and straw-bale houses, and investing in software that hopefully helps me respect the time I’ve spent reading about the details.

The conversation doesn’t get better when it doesn’t happen. Our “consciousness” remains stunted at whatever snippets we can remember from the half-read article before or after work. Our jovial polite impressions of one another, or stark raving lunatic screaming professions about one another, remain different extremes to the same end. Maybe not your end, in your little world, concerned with your little self. But an end that might terrify, or dejectedly relieve you, were the circumstances switched. The “government,” our “educations,” the “fix,” whatever you’re mad at or supports you are all what you’re choosing to do right now. Or, they’re all subjected to the unconscious whimsy of business as usual.

Am I trying to guilt trip you? Is asking for informed empathic conversation too much? Is working together not just unreasonable given proximity, but who has the time? I won’t pretend I know what your path or method consists of, but it shouldn’t be silence. It shouldn’t be judgment or anger. You should do like me. Be weird. Insist. Encourage. Try to do it differently and experiment. Talk for as long as it takes. Dive into what makes you afraid and uncomfortable. That’s where my friends lie and what I want to see the future consist of. Anything less seems pointless.