In Dorothy Day's writings, it seems there is almost a magical symbolic aura around poverty. Day quotes scripture to reason out that, "the love of money is the root of all evil," and proclaims that, "our work... [that] we perform here at the headquarters of the Catholic Worker [is] without other salary or recompense."
This is a very self-serving martyristic attitude. In denying money and clothing herself metaphorically in literary allusions to biblical texts, Day is denying the true nature of poverty. She is romanticizing this squalid human condition through symbolic and literal martyrdom: willful suffering on behalf of an ideal.
In her romanticizing of poverty, she does an extreme dis-service to the poor. Instead of lifting them out of their suffering onto a higher plane of existence and well-being of life, she decides to drop down among them and rolls around in the filth and muck of the dregs of society; afterwards, she raises up to show her pierced palms of piety and turns to shows off her abdominal laceration of suffering and says that she, too, belongs among those who have befallen hard times. This self-centered and self-serving display is something that comes near nauseating for me to watch for several reasons.
To begin with, there is there is no human altruism. Everything is done for a self-serving viewpoint. Day entered into this choice of lifestyle with more than likely this conscious mindset: I am going to help these people. A closer analysis of this would reveal that in helping people, she would be feeling better about herself. This is self-serving. In feeling better about herself, it can be seen from a biochemical, societal or spiritual viewpoint. Biochemically, upon helping and feeling good, her brain releases a higher saturation of endodorphine and serotonin molecules, which alleviate her mood in the same way that THC or heroin does. Societally, she is placed into higher esteem by following the ubiquitous creed of helping the impoverished. Spiritually, she is placing herself in a spotlight and saying, "God, I am better than the others around me because I am following your word. Save me, God, when you see who and what I am compared to the others." This emotional posturing is sickening.
Hence, Dear Reader, you can imagine Day to be analogous to a person who shops at a fine boutique store as opposed to Wal-Mart. By her choice of where to spend her resources, (time and passion),Day is essentially placing herself above other people in a very selfish act. She is stating, through her actions, "I am better than you because of where I choose to be. I am therefore an elitest and am placing myself above the masses, who shop at Wal-Mart." This egotistical subconcious stance is sickening.
In regards to any sense of the Christian God- regarding religion, I am certainly a hopeful theological agnostic, to let the Reader know the lens through which I am viewing this situation on- I do not think that an All-Loving Entity would wish for It's Creation, Mankind, to be suffering and unable to live to their fullest prospect and potential. Poverty, by definition, causes a degraded standard of life. A lowered standard of life, by definition, causes a truncated lifespan. Follow the thread, my Reader! Extrapolated out, an all powerful entity (again, assuming the Christian aspect of a benevolently rational-minded One), would certainly wish that It's beloved creation should live out the fullest of their lifespan to foment the greatest possible learning experience on this earth while enjoying it to the utmost. To assume that it is blessed to be starving, freezing and rotting from the inside out due to lack of purchasing power for medicine is sickening.
Lastly, instead of sitting alongside homeless eating turnip soup and giving out woolen blankets so a few families can sleep on canvas cots half-eaten through with dry-rot, Day would better help the poor with an investment firm. In raising money, she could build large communal centers with abundant facilities and services for the all the poor of the city, as opposed to a singular dilapidated house that has limited and finite abilities for taking care of those in need. This sacrifice of the good of the whole, throwing away her entrepreneurial possibilities and talents (for Day is obviously an intelligent woman) for the lifestyle of an impoverished citizen, is sickening.
Please, Dear Reader, do not make the mistake of thinking that I am un-aware that mainstream materialistic societal standards see poverty as "bad"; as Professor Morrie of Harvard said, "Make your own culture." I am a total advocate for abolishment of mainstream culture in addition to counter-stream culture: for counter-stream culture is dictated just as much by mainstream culture if not more so. Counterculture can only react, whereas mainstream culture can change and grow. It is quite possible for a non-materialistic outlook on life to be achieved without forcing one's self into poverty to do so. This brief interjection, Reader, is to qualm the voices that I hear clamoring in your head that I am looking at this from a centralist viewpoint of mainstream culture that poverty is something to be considered "ugly," or "bad."
It is one thing to be born into poverty. It is another thing to be self-sufficient and then, through financial mishaps, find one's self in poverty. The legendary cowboy Charles Goodnight went bankrupt three times into squalid poverty and he managed to build up enough of a fortune again to be totally destroyed again. Both poverty by birth and poverty by chance are things which one ought not to be ashamed of: however, to be born above and then lower yourself willingly into poverty is altogether in another arena by itself. This is making a mockery of both of those who have found themselves in this area by a faulty deal of fate's dice and are struggling to get out of it.I know what poverty is like. I grew up surrounded by it. Fortunately, despite being immersed in it, I was never a part of it in a statistical sense. Poverty is not something that is meaningless enough that it can be considered a choice to go cavort off and live among the impoverished. While my Reader is free to draw another conclusion, to me the fascination of poverty to the point of living in poverty is intellectually paralleling an obsessive fascination of the dead that ends in necrophilia. Poverty is not a romantic adventure: it is a crushing, bitterly devastating social construct which breeds violence, hatred and despair.
Clearly, poverty is an easily traceable causality of violence: poverty leads to want or need. This emotion leads to ambition: either ambition can be carried out positively, with a job search for the earning of a medium transferable to satisfy this emotion; or negativity, with taking what one is lacking. With a dearth of job possibilities stemming from a variety of sources- including, but not lacking, educational, opportunal, and societal factors- the latter course is the one that is enacted upon. Alternatively, an underground economy is created to supplement the demand for jobs: and, by this, I mean a narcotics market. Big rewards in a short amount of time make this sometimes even more lucrative than traditional employment markets even when employment opportunities exists in the latter. While morally lamentable, keep in mind Dear Reader, this is backed up soundly by the social science of economics.
In regards to the aforementioned violence, when it was my bedtime in Galveston, Texas, I would hear nightly automatic gunfire. Nightfall bolstered confidence of wanting to do deeds they might not have had the courage to do in the nighttime. Our house had steel hurricane shutters. We closed these nightly as preventative against not the fury of nature, but the fury of a stray .9 mm round. There were places that ambulances would not go, nor police cars patrol after nightfall.
If a member of the G-town's hood, as the neighborhoods of Galveston were quaintly known in street-colloquial, were wounded in an exchange of violence, his friends would take him to the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB)where he would be unceremoniously dumped literally out the car door to land in front of the emergency room entrance with his surname and a contact number of a relative scrawled across a sufficiently unwounded piece of flesh. The car would squeal off in a noxious cloud of blue-black vaporized rubber. Dear Reader, you may find yourself questioning this action: why would any sane human do this to a peer of whom he shares a bond of friendship? The answer is calculatingly simple: this was to prevent the nasty police-questionings and subsequent interruptions of gang-cohesion (men lost through arrests, prosecutions) that could translate into lost members, thus decreasing projected power and influence on the street, endangering the gang's very net survival.
The violence was not limited to the street. From fourth through sixth grade I learned many useful things in school that I would not have had I grown up the safe suburbs of a large city.
For example, in fourth grade, we had a Drug Abuse Resistance and Education (DARE) program. Introduction to common drugs, and how to use them, from heroin to cocaine was the gambit of this course. Several classmates- yes, Dear Reader, fourth-grade classmates- took notes with the intent for an instruction as a "how to do," for drugs that they had not heard of yet.
In addition, in fifth grade, we learned how to survive drive-by shootings: drop and cover the head, as the gunfire coming from the car is horizontal. This firing pattern is designed for maximum damage to maximum amount of people. The perpetrator will rarely track individuals to the ground when others are trying to run away vertically.
Equally important, in sixth grade we had a Gang Resistance Education And Training (GREAT) program. This specific class included directions, along with full-color diagrams, on how to operate the safety-feature on frequently common firearms in the city: these ranged from assault-rifles (Israeli-made Uzis), to shotguns (American-made XM-8), to side-arms (German-made Beretta 9mm). There was more international diversity in the firearms than in the urban population. I learned about various types of ammunition rounds and to recognize what wounds derived from these were. Full metal jacket (FMJ) is a steel-coated round which makes a clean hole. Hollow point (JHP) has a dome of steel on top that compresses outwards upon impact, digging a large hole in soft flesh. Star-point are JHP that have the top slit into sections so when it impacts, springs outwards apart to cause a ragged-star-shaped wound in the body. Hydroshok take advantage of the fact that over 80% of the human body is water. A steel rod engineered in the center of a soft casing causes, upon impact with the body, a supersonic wave of energy to radiate outwards through the body. This causes the literal implosion of organs by collapsing the internal cellular structures that rely on strict regulation of hydro-static pressures. It was in GREAT I learned that bones vibrate internally, as violently as a piano-tuner does, for several minutes after the initial impact.
In addition to ballistics, firearm operations, and medical information of combat wounds normally contained to a CIA operative's training, we were tested on aerial photography of the city. Large blow-up photos of street plans from City Hall had scrawled neon color blocks of known gang areas based on gathered data: observed spray-paint tags and willing informants. Crypts, Bloods, Wootang, MS-13... I think that there were over a dozen gangs fighting territory in a city the under of fifty-square miles, but do not recall at this point in time.
Moreover, the metropolitan police officers that directed these sessions repeatedly hammered into our head that the problems stemmed from drugs and that the drug problem stemmed from a poverty problem. An inquisitive student innocently asked, "Why not do something about poverty?" The officer helplessly stood slack and slowly shook his head and said, "Its up to the Goddamn politicians;" started at what he said, and then apologized profusely for his language to my teacher. This made an impression on me that has stayed with me up until today as I write this in TDR. I can still see his frustration and helplessness stamped across the broad, honest features of his face, his cropped regulation flat-top haircut pivoting back and forth in dismay.
The stemming violence, devastation and destruction of ambition, shattered family structures, and inhumanity of poverty is why I think that Dorothy Day's idea of living with the impoverished is such a travesty and a monstrosity. Instead of adequately serving her fellow humans by bettering their situation, lifting them up through entrepreneurial ship, she decides to selfishly lower herself to their level and become a martyr. This leads to a perpetuation of the problem that stems so many other horrorific acts.
Conclusively, it is obvious that in the same sense Bush is responsible for the recent killing of a little black child on March 16, 2005, Day may be similarly held responsible for the death of a child. By enacting the Texas Futile Health Care Law, when Governor of Texas, this forces the disconnecting of life support machinery in irreversible permanent vegetative state (PVS) patients if the patient cannot pay for continued support. This thus saves health care service conglomerates money. Be prepared for a shocking piece of trivia, O, Reader! Heath care service corporations are big Republican donors. According to followthemoney.org, Bush received $17.5 million from Health Care corporations in his 1998 Gubernatorial race while in the 2004 presidential race, Heath Care Industries gave him $189.8 million. Therefore, when a Crypt gang commits a drive by in a Blood neighborhood because of a lack of a internal social structure that has been corroded by poverty, Day is partly to blame. Both Bush and Day lacked the foresight of passion to tell what events their actions were causing and both acted in a self-interested manner: these actions radiated out in a ring which cause suffering, hatred and violence even today.