Once upon a time there was a young wingnut who didn't realize that's what she was, raised to fear and hate and pity and pray for the conversion of the Godless Commie Babykilling Civilization-Hating Liberals who were trying to destroy all that was Good and True and Wholesome in the world, until little by little she worked out that things outside her community's bubble were not exactly as her elders had described them to her.
But she was still dumb enough to believe her elders - both the theocon ones and the secular-humanist ones in the wider world of school and the media - when they said that working hard and studying hard was both necessary and sufficient for earthly success.
This, though she had seen how the children of doctors and lawyers were treated better by her teachers, and how malignant fools who made the right noises in the right places (smooch,boot-or-buttocks) got promoted over people (not just herself) who had worked longer, harder, and better over the years.
So she went out to seek her fortune and tried to make it on her own, with about five thousand dollars in savings...
Before I go on to detail my various ordeals of unemployment, underemployment, and insurance company predation, however, I am going to read y'all my personal Riot Act of offending responses for which I will HuRt the commenter as I can't dope-slap him/her through the intertubes. IOW, you will have been warned, before anybody makes a stupid comment and suffers the consequences. Yes, I am a castiron bastard; no, I don't care about that. We poor folks have enough to deal with without the "Well-Meaning" [sic] making things worse, and elevated blood pressure definitely counts as such.
PLEASE do not do any of the following:
- Say that I should travel to Mexico or other Points South/North/East/West to get inexpensive medical care "and a nice vacation" at the same time. No, really, clueless bourgie Kossacks have done so. After being informed that I barely make rent each month living paycheck to paycheck. Yes, I was Not Nice to them, after.
- Tell me that there MUST be helpful programs & resources locally available for me, I must just not be looking hard enough. Links or I HuRt you. I am fucking DONE with having doors slammed in my face by state agencies and private charities alike for being both too poor and too rich, and getting smoothly insulted by the "facilitators" into the bargain, and if you've never been there then you have no business telling me what's out here for us working poor. If you don't live in my state, nay, my town, you have no business, even.
- Tell me that there are OODLES of good jobs going begging for smart, hardworking individuals such as myself and I just must not be looking hard enough - or doing something wrong like forgetting to bathe before going to interviews or leaving out some magic formula in my resume. If you HAVE a job to offer me, email me. Otherwise, STFU before I put a world of HuRt on you.
3a) Tell me that there must be Free Stimulus Money that I can just pick off a Stimulus Bush if I just look hard enough for it.
3b) Tell me to get rich by writing a novel. Obviously you have never come within spitting distance of the publishing industry and worse yet don't believe in doing research and thus deserve to be HuRt for your sloth and smuggery.
3c) Tell me to get rich by being a web designer/hosting reseller. Because what the world needs now is MOAR incompetent, barely-HTML literate faux-gurus trying to compete for another slice of that Oleanna pie. No really, I think it's an unfilled niche!
3d) Tell me to get rich by freelancing in some other way. Just don't go there - unless you're a venture capitalist planning on writing me a very large check before you finish reading this diary, in which case you need to email me for the address to send it to.
- Tell me I should just move someplace with jobs and/or national healthcare. Unless you're planning on subsidizing my moving expenses, my living expenses until such time as I find a job, my passport, &c &c OR have a job to give me, you're just farting through your mouth; take your Lord-and-Lady Bountiful bullshit and shove it. (No, really, other countries don't want broke refugees with redundant skill sets, either. TRUFAX, as we say in fandom.)
- Tell me to just keep hoping, that things are magically bound to get better for me before I die of some preventable/treatable condition that I couldn't afford to prevent or treat, or get thrown out onto the street. I don't believe in Tinkerbell, wishing on stars, or Hallmark Hall-of-Fame miracle endings, and if you're online, then you're too old to believe in them either.
--Yes, this is me being polite. If you can't understand why committing any of these is sufficient to make me have to restrain myself from throwing a chair at you, then at least have the sense to avoid revealing your ignorance and getting deservedly HuRt for it. It's just like a stupid young wolf cub getting nipped by a pack elder for doing something that could get it into real trouble in the world outside the den.
--Okay, now that we've gotten that potential for unpleasantness out of the way, here's the rest of the story, which I recount NOT because I think it particularly unique or exceptional but because I know it is not. Most of this I've told before in past years, in comments to nyceve's diaries and others as well as blog posts, but there are always newcomers who haven't heard it, and given the number of recently-awakened Rip Van Winkles who are just shocked, SHOCKED to find out that this is going on "in this great nation" of ours and think it's something new, I don't think it can hurt to lay it all out again, and in one place, and nyceve has asked us to share them, so I will.
As I said, I was raised to believe that working hard and getting good grades in school, and being a diligent and skilled employee, was What It Took to guarantee a good job that paid a decent salary.
--Actually, I was raised to believe that it was my female obligation to be either a Stay At Home Housewife having as many children as I could physically bear (we hadn't coined the monker "Quiverfull" yet in the Seventies, but my elders did invoke the eponymous bible verse a lot) OR to become a sister in a religious order, either nobly bringing the Light of Truth to the heathens as a missionary, or as a Bride of Christ praying perpetually for the salvation of souls in a convent.
But since I was clearly so unattractive and inadequate a specimen of young Catholic womanhood even as a teenager that the odds of my getting a husband were damn slim (not that I wanted one anyway, having seen the horrorshow that was my parents' marriage up close and personal all those years - but I couldn't SAY this, of course!) and since I couldn't seem to find My Vocation(TM) no matter how many copies of The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux were given me, it was made clear to me that I would need to get good grades so that I could get scholarships (good grades, I was told, were the ONLY thing that mattered in re school funding) to get the good college degree that was all-critical in getting a decent job. Didn't matter what field, just that it be a BA with a good GPA.
Yes, my parents were very dumb. I can't really call them "naive", because willful ignorance contraindicates naivete; this was the same sort of willful ignorance that led them to go on refusing sex education and embracing abstinence-only (translation, "ignorance only") as a way of "protecting" us from premarital sex...even after multiple kids' unreported family-friend molestations, and multiple premarital pregnancies, not just in our conservative Christian family. Mere evidence cannot overcome ideology.
But I didn't have enough worldly experience, and I didn't have enough reading, or the self-confidence to go with my instincts, and say "But what about the evidence that popularity counts more than hard work or intelligence? And that power, of which money is the biggest component, is the surest path to popularity? This is how it works in all my schools, and how it seems to work in the workaday world, from your stories--"
Besides, the Apocalypse was going to surely come, the Great Chastisement for our Sinful Society's tolerance of Abortion and Sexual Immorality generally, any day now, so it really didn't seem all that crucial to me. Or else I was going to kill myself first (yes, my home life really was that bad, and worse.) And I still partly believed in the Mystical Griselda thing - that if you just suffered in silence dutifully long enough, God/The Cosmos would reward you for it not just in the hereafter, but like a Hallmark Hall-of-Fame movie or an Afterschool Special or a Heartwarming Inspirational book for the kiddies, you would achieve recognition and safety in the herenow.
Yeah, I was dumb too. But I was younger and didn't have the counter-experiences to ignore, at that point.
Anyways, I got through HS despite horrible depression and constant fear of police lights at our house and etc, and got through college the same way (I wanted to go to art school and become an illustrator/animator, but my parents didn't want me being subject to all those liberal influences and especially drawing naked guys, and told me that surely I could teach myself anything I needed to know, being so talented) with a small piece of sheepskin reading "Magna Cum Laude" and "BA Phil", and a ton of debt. Also with a severe allergy to having anything to do with Christian Liberal Arts Majors, particularly other Philosophy ones. The combination of sexism, smuggery, and the vanitas vanitatum that saw all discourse and dialectic as a way only of contending as in a duel, which filled the majority of the department, depressed me in a way that only (re)reading the Penguin Lucian could alleviate.
I was told by the department head and other faculty that if I didn't go to grad school I was Doomed careerwise, that there was no point to having gotten a BA Phil without going on to get a further MA and PhD, because the whole point of studying philosophy was to prepare one's self to teach philosophy in a college setting. Which seemed circular to me, but what did I, being young and female, know about anything? But since I knew that if I did go to grad school - and my parents didn't actually give a damn what I did so long as it didn't cost them money by that point - I would speedily be unable to resist the temptation to drive into a tree, I figured I was doomed regardless. I tried to freelance, paying a small rent for the privilege of continuing to live in a chilly, damp, mildewy, bug-infested room in my parents' basement. (No, I'm not kidding about any of that. The arthropoda and I mostly got along okay, but there were some significant exceptions.)
As I had graduated, my health insurance now became my own responsibility. I had managed to save up a little from various freelance graphics projects in the past couple years but this went like grass in a fire, between paying my premiums and spending money on samples to send out in a fruitless attempt to drum up business, and gas spent on driving to meetings in which I found that no, raw untrained "talent" was not, in fact, enough to convince advertising firms to give me hundreds of dollars a month I needed to pay BCBS and avoid the impending catastrophe of student loans coming due.
Here's a tip: if you're tempted to become a freelance graphic designer/illustrator, and you don't have a spouse/SO with a fulltime job, or a small fortune to start with, just take whatever savings you have out of the bank and make a bonfire with the cash. You will at least get some pleasure and warmth from them, that way.
After I had run through them all, I had to get a job in order to continue to pay my rent and premiums and student loans; the only job I could find for which I was remotely qualified was an entry-level prepress one some ten miles away at a company which I had a distant and complicated family/business connection to. I was paid $7.50 an hour for the night shift (this was in the first half of the '90s) to clean up the mistakes and interpret the half-assed instructions of the vastly-better-paid who had gone off to go golfing or drinking already, having congratulated themselves on cheating yet another customer too dumb to know how they were getting rooked.
Even that did not turn me into a full-fledged radical/cynic: I told myself it must just be this company, surely it couldn't be the whole industry lurching along in such an inefficient as well as unjust and exploitative fashion. (I was wrong: it was, and is, and TPTB in printing mostly don't see it any more than TPTB at the airline industry or the automotive industry, even yet. The ones who do, are screaming from the deck of the Titanic at the helmsmen.)
Nobody got promoted up from within, despite what we were told when we were hired; there were no profits in the "profit-sharing" program though there was mysteriously enough to pay the owner's son and daughter enough to buy new Beemers; it was an open joke that the owner hired based on the buxomness and blondness of the applicants (making it a mystery to all why I was hired until my complex fiscal connections were revealed) and the turnover there was high and constant, and the reasons not a secret, and yet they saw no reason to do anything differently.
It was full time, and had health insurance - pretty sure it was BCBS, though I couldn't swear to it absolutely at this late date. At any rate, I had a minor accident involving a door which resulted in a hand injury which didn't go down after a couple days, so I went to the ER and then had to go for a follow-up office visit. It ended up costing me a couple hundred dollars, which wasn't so bad, but I remember being confused because it sure seemed like I was billed twice for it, but I figured it must just be my stupidity at not understanding the paperwork and the policy.
--Now, in retrospect, I am less sure that it was only my poor reading comprehension. Not after reading so much since about how it's policy to try to cheat the customer for all that can be gotten away with, at so many insurance outfits. But that's old water long under a distant bridge.
Anyway, the job was dull, the working environment was beyond horrible, and it was clearly a dead-end career-wise. After about a year, I was desperate enough to take a job at my family's company, bringing Christianity of the right political and doctrinal sort to The Masses; I still hadn't confronted my ethical and intellectual doubts about our beliefs, though I described myself "a-political" and "a moderate" by then instead of as proudly conservative.
Our conservativism was all of the "social" kind, that is to say, the sex-obsessed, rather than the "fiscal" sort - we were proto-Crunchy-Cons with an anarcho-syndicalist, special-option-for-the-poor bent, meaning we were gullible "prolife" tools of the warmongering, pro-death-penalty, anti-immigration, racist, plutocratic meocons. Meaning we mostly didn't listen to, or think about, the anti-worker, anti-poor-people rhetoric of our actual movement leaders. But working in conservative media made it a lot harder for me to avoid, even if I didn't know what three-quarters of the debates were about, being oblivious to most of the dogwhistles: reading National Review etc made me suspect that These People Are Not On Our Side, where "us" equals poor people struggling to make ends meet. (When I learned that Buckley was a scion of oil barons, that clinched it; but they did not advertise their vested interests to us rank-and-file cons.)
My parents were partly only poor because they chose to have more of us than they could support without constant subsidies from people who didn't choose to have X times the national average of offspring, and partly because of their wives-shouldn't-work-outside ideology, and partly because of The Mission to teach conservative ideology which they had embraced; but we were still poor. But being a good middle-American schoolkid who went to public high school, and to a mainstream college, I had only the barest and fuzziest sense of the history of the warfare of the upper classes against the rest of us, and most of it where not lacking was flat wrong.
IOW, I didn't come to my radical leftist economic views by indoctrination, but - nearly all - from working for conservatives and/or Republicans for many many years. So, for instance, hearing my father defend unequal pay for women on the grounds that our work was worth less due to the fact that we'd leave to marry & have babies - despite the fact that none of his female employees and several of his male ones had; or that men with families "deserved" to be paid more, and that was yes, WJWD, based on the Parable of the Vineyard, and realizing that I would NEVER be able to afford a house or security on what I was getting paid, nor would ever "deserve" to - that, with a whole bunch of other personal friction (only some of it stemming from things like my father also embracing the view that only property-owners should vote, now that he owned a house), and my increasing certainty that what I was helping peddle was NOT The Truth, meant I had to leave there before I killed myself. (I was carrying a shotgun shell around in my pocket to help me get through the workdays, by then: reminding myself that I had an exit in a cabinet back home helped me survive the madness there.
It was getting some professional, secular (gasp!) psych counseling - which I could just barely afford, because I had Blue Cross through the family business - that got me to the point where I could see that it was not my duty to just Suffer For The World's Sins, and that I was not so much crazy (as my father, not knowing the half of it, told me on a regular basis) as being driven to distraction by the impossibility of my circumstances, which I needed to get out of before I did something drastic to myself, or got recklessly careless and made an irrevocable "mistake."
So, as I said in my facetious introduction, I - guiltily, reluctantly, and in some dread of my sinner's fate - went my own separate way; I had at that point about as I recall $5K in savings and had nearly paid off my student loans, although I had a few thousand in credit card debt - which I had taken on because I was told by my elders that I needed to to guarantee a credit history to buy a house in the future(!)
I thought I would be able to get a decent job easily - after all, that was what my teachers, guidance counselors, principles and parents had assured me all those years! Meanwhile, I did not dare - so well I had been indoctrinated by my parents about the folly of going without insurance - not to pay my COBRA, so between my rent and the hundreds of dollars of premiums those savings went to nothing pretty fast.
I found that the only full-time benefitted job I could get, after months of applying, and a horrible minimum-wage part-time temp job in an environmental testing lab, was a $10-an-hour prepress/customer-service/bindery job at a copy shop. Again, there was a sort of connection there: they knew me - and the quality of my work - from years as a customer. I swiftly found out that they were not good people - tho' superficially "nice" - though it was not until after three years of working dutifully and doing everything I could to improve the business there with nary a raise nor a kind word, that it began to click that maybe it was because they were conservative Republican Catholics, too - that maybe their Rush-venerating politics had something to do with the way they treated their employees.
By that point my credit was shot; I was making so little hourly that it took everything I had to make rent - which went up and up, as did my insurance premiums - and then some, I was working a second job at the mall when I could just to keep my aging car (a gift from the only relative who had ever given a damn about me, by then deceased) going, and many months I had no telephone nor electricity.
Ironically, I had a horrible dental problem which I could not afford to treat because of all the money I was spending for insurance: a broken tooth had been badly filled, before I was first out of work, and this kept on getting worse and worse. This became a recurring theme in my life, as it is today: I became an expert at filing down sharp edges with nail files, at scraping and prying out broken bits with various craft tools, and at enduring pain. I have, to date, four deeply-abscessed teeth, and no hope of getting them fixed, unless I win the lottery. (Chewing cloves will help with the pain if you can't afford anything better like an over-the-counter topical, as will swishing with vodka, which is cheaper than Listerine.)
Anyhow I got laid off, when the tech sector, which had been a large part of the local economic revival, tanked and certain large eggs that were the bulk of what was in my employers' basket all cracked at once. Then I had to fight them to get my (useless, wasteful, subsequently-investigated-for-fraud) 401k money released to avoid getting evicted while I was looking for work. I drove my car into the garage and eventually into the ground taking multiple part-time and temp jobs, and I didn't bother trying to keep up with feeding the COBRA this time - to the shocked and disbelieving dismay of my acquaintances, who simply could not get it through their thick skulls that when the choice was between PAYING MY RENT and paying for what I had come to suspect was worthless, useless "insurance", that was a no-brainer. I could have a roof over my head in an old tenement building in a poorer part of town, or I could give money to a corporation and get nothing in return for it but a promissory note.
Tough choice, that.
Yeah, I "voluntarily" went "naked," because I thought I was immortal. Because I'd rather suffer through bronchitis treated with nothing but hot toddies and Vitamin C and desperate hope that it didn't turn into pneumonia again, than go to a doctor. Because "Pray I Don't Get Sick Or Hurt Again" is SO much more comforting than making enough money to actually have food, shelter AND medical care all at once.
And food sometimes had to go by the wayside: there was a point when I had to ration even my beans and rice, and lost so much weight in such a short time - working two jobs mind you - that my menses went haywire and I started bleeding randomly and then constantly, which caused me to have horrible panic attacks until I remembered that stress could mess up your cycles, though I'd only heard of them stopping for lack of nutrition, but a night's googling reassured me that no, it could also cause non-cyclical flows, too, and I was likely "only" bleeding due to hunger and fear of eviction. Hey, greatest country/best health care in the world! (I know what Beau's Lines are, too. Wanna see mine?) It stopped when I got semi-regular meals that included more cheese and meat.
Then I got a job which offered insurance to the tune of about $200 a month and rising. So my take-home pay was again in the realm of $1300 a month and declining. Meanwhile, of course, rent and cost of living generally was going up, including gas, and my aged clunker had to be replaced by another clunker and when that one turned out to be a dud, another. A lot of that time, I had to walk almost 5 miles back and forth to work - our public transit system was then, as it is now, inadequate in a lot of ways.
I still didn't dare not have "health insurance", though - I felt that I would be taking an unconscionable gamble with my health and life, if I didn't spend almost $260 a month on something I couldn't afford to use. So brainwashed was I, indeed.
--I mentioned my busted teeth, you recall.
One of them nearly killed me during that time, and I would be dead if it weren't for the internet and the kindness of the virtually-acquainted in fandom; I couldn't even get together the $150 needed to get an emergency drilling, on my own. The infection started to go systemic, though initially without localized pain, and at first I thought I had Lyme Disease or something similar. The neural damage that went down my neck and shoulder still persists, intermittently inhibiting my mobility as well as comfort to this day.
Likewise with my optical problems: $200 for a pair of specialty prescription glasses. Where is this supposed to come from, when I make $300 a week if I'm lucky? Poor folks like us don't get to rack up the overtime, and without a car, I can't even take a second job now - not that doing so when I had wheels ever did anything but make me sicker, more often, from exhaustion and malnutrition taking their toll on my immune system, and still not able to get ahead financially.
This is why I feel like hosting Molotov Cocktail Parties if mandates are passed, and why I don't feel all that encouraged by the "public option" - oh yay, cheaper junk insurance! Hot diggety, wave the paper flag and all that.
After that job - which was, again, for conservative Catholic Republicans - turned out to be a madhouse of revolving doors and self-destructive paranoia, I tried to blog professionally for a while, but didn't make enough to make rent from my tip jar, and I went to work at another, nominally-liberal, media outlet where, again, we exploited peons had the option of buying $200+ per month Anthem/BC that, of course, had high deductibles and also of what turned out to be junk dental - they would only cover fillings and root canals if you had already paid into the system the total cost of the treatment. A scam, and one which I discontinued when I found out they covered nothing but part of cleanings.
When the economy started sinking in 2007, I, as the second-highest paid person in the department (again, $300/week, we're not talking big bucks here) was replaced with a couple part timers fresh out of school, because apparently having clueless n00bs is cheaper despite all the mistakes they make, and this time again I didn't bother with the COBRA. But when, after several months, I finally got another job in the same $20k range, I did again sign up for the insurance scam - I didn't dare not to. Only my boss didn't bother to put the paperwork through in a timely fashioned, so it turned out when the company vehicle I was a passenger in, got in an accident resulting in airbags going off, I couldn't go to the doctor or even the ER, because I had no money to pay out of pocket. I had to tough it out, with what I strongly suspect was a cracked sternum and some other musculo-skeletal damage, working through excruciating pain for the next month and a half with only OTC anti-inflammatories (and a fair amount of after-hours booze, spaced across mandatory safe time limits) to alleviate it.
When I did finally get the Harvard Pilgrim paperwork taken care of - the medium plan, the $250-a-month one, not the $400 a month top-level individual plan, not the $100-a-month covers nothing but catastrophe plan, which was all I could afford on my $12/hr salary (and overtime is NOT something you can just take in most lines of work, a fact that far too many conservatives seem unaware of) - I was finally able to go in for a checkup and get prescribed physical therapy - which I had no way of actually getting to, or paying the copays for - and a routine blood test, and the reassurance that I was generally in good health...and the recommendation that I get another test for an often-fatal disease that had struck in my family already (one of several conditions I have to worry about, btw.)
Okay, I thought, I can afford this - it'll be tight, saving up the $150 copay that it looked like it would be from my Harvard Pilgrim benefits card, but it's important enough. I make the appointment, and then - I find out that it would cost me over $1000 out of pocket - it wasn't covered because the test was considered surgery according to Harvard Pilgrim, and the surgery deductible was $1500.
"Can't you put it on a credit card?" the secretary asked me.
--No, I don't HAVE any goddamn credit cards, and if I did I wouldn't be able to pay it off! That's an entire month's paycheck and my rent takes 3/4 of my paycheck! - I was furious, and then resigned. I had, once again, fallen for the scam: because if I'd not been paying out a thousand dollars to Harard Pilgrim every four months, I would have had the money to pay for it...assuming I could have gotten a doctor to refer me for it! Catch-22 all the way. Oh well, if I get congestive heart failure I die of a heart attack; if I get cancer I get cancer; if I get MS - you get the drift.
The - of course - conservative Catholic Republican McCain/Palin fan of an owner managed to run that recently-acquired company into the ground within a little over a year of my starting there, something I figured out was happening and began searching for a new job about halfway through, without any luck. Several COBRA-less months of barely evading eviction with my miserable unemployment check and "a little help from my friends" as the song says - I finally got a (singular) response to all my sent resumes.
Now, I work for just about minimum wage, something less than $8 per hour, with no benefits, for a company in violation of multiple labor laws - I don't get a pay stub, frex - run by a Hannity fan who is also a compulsive liar with anger issues, and whose unfortunately remains still the only offer in response to all my job searching from July of 2008 to the present. I can't even try for food stamps now, though I might qualify for them, because I have no way to prove my income. I look, every damn day, for a job that pays a living wage, and I send out resumes, and I almost never hear back, and if I do, I don't get the job.
And why should I? I'm not a special snowflake; yes, I am intelligent (for certain values of intelligent) and reasonably personable and mannerly and yes, I am hard-working and quite competent in my narrow little field - my unvalued, despised-by-the-employers field - and this country is FULL of people with BAs and good grades and skills that are even more in demand than mine, and the dirty, dirty secret of Capitalism is that the system - of profits and wealth for a select few, owners, managers, and shareholders - DEPENDS on there being not enough good jobs and far too many of us competing for them.
Why should I luck out and get one of them? Particularly with no experience in any of those fields. Nor any connections of the sort that overcome lack of experience, training, certification or the rest of it, here in New England as well as elsewhere in the world. (Nepotism's just "the Boston way", one caught pol shrugged off the cushy nephew-sinecure he'd created in the Big Dig, a few years back.) The odds are not, and never have been in my favor, even without the complication of how many business owners, like my father, personally believe that women shouldn't be taking away the good jobs from men with families to support (or who want to become in a position to support a future family, either.)
The printing industry is self-destructing; the printing industry is also riddled with old wingnuts; I leave it to you to whether or not there is any connection. And clerical jobs that pay even so much as $20K a year are few and far between, in New England: most are part-time, and thus do not even come with junk insurance. Those that are close enough for me to walk to are even fewer and further between; and many of us are vying for them, as was the case in the 1990s too.
Oh, and
- Don't tell me I should just go back to school and get retrained, unless you intend to pay for my tuition, my transportation, my rent and other minimal living expenses for the duration.
- Nor tell me that I must be able to afford a car, either. All the money I was saving up to get my teeth pulled went to keeping my last clunker rolling. Like junk Anthem/BCBS/Harvard Pilgrim "insurance" it's blood I cannot possibly continue to extract from this turnip of a dead-end job in a dead-end field.
- Don't fucking tell me to get out of printing either - what the hell do you think I've been trying to do for the past 15 years?
As I said last year, I don't believe that a Democratic administration will help me, when it never did before: my first long years of hunger and no access to health care were the Clinton years, my second span of unemployment due to the popping of the tech bubble rather than to GWB, and I am a realist, not an optimist. I write fantasy; I don't convince myself that it's true. Wishthink died a painful death for me a long time ago; I believe in Luck, but I do not convince myself that the Green-Eyed Lady will ever favor me. I think that things will be worse for more people under any future Republican governments, but I do not think that the converse means any betterment for me or any of the millions like me, here or elsewhere in the world. I don't expect to ever get a good job, any more than I expect to win Powerball, and I don't see that even a public option will allow me to more than buy cheaper junk insurance that still won't allow me to take advantage of the American medical system.
I'd be delighted to be proven wrong; but I don't count on it.
--Ever since I was a teenager, one of my personal Sacred Texts has been Yeats' "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death" - reciting bits of it often helped keep me from killing myself, during those dire years of terror and daily hopelessness when the river was all too easily accessed (it's not that much harder now, as I am reminded almost every day crossing the bridge) because I couldn't see or say that THIS death was in any way accomplishing anything, any way worth anything, and I wanted then a martyr's glory. (It was how I was raised, all right? Martyrdom Narratives were acceptable inspirational material for little theocon kids.)
But as I grew older and more aware of the world and its ways, the part that resonated most for me became
"My country is Kiltartan Cross
My countrymen, Kiltartan's poor
No likely end shall bring them loss
or leave them happier than before" -
the same theme I had been warned of, as an ignorant schoolchild, by opening and closing splash pages the comic book Tintin and the Picaros, too young then to understand that "The good guys win" doesn't mean a thing in the long run to the majority of us, whose lot remains unchanged. Maybe the new boss won't be QUITE as horrible as the old boss, if we're very lucky. --Maybe.
Dreams of dramatic martyrdom became both unattainable, and, increasingly, unattractive: I decided that I'd rather live, escape the poverty trap, suceed at something and show all the sons and daughters of guns who tried their damnedest to wear me down - but that didn't and doesn't lie solely in MY hands, alas! And I've had a better run than ever I expected, when I prayed nightly at age fourteen to die of a blood clot or heart attack or car accident to spare me the temptation daily to commit the mortal sin of suicide, or when I thought I'd never make it to 37 let alone 40, and thought too that I was all alone and there was no one out here as "crazy" and "eat-up" as me... Regrets, plenty, but not as many as might be - mostly that I didn't rebel sooner, that I tried so hard to be the good girl for so long. Vive la revolution!
But if I should happen to die relatively young of a preventable condition which I was unable to access treatment for - well, it won't be a Martyrdom, and it won't weigh much in the grand scheme of things, but it will have some utility, if publicized, and possibly some positive consequence. Which is the best any of us can hope for, from life or death, after all.
I'm not THAT noble, mind you. Sometimes I have almost regretted not staying in the wingnut welfare fold - think "If I'd sold out I wouldn't be here, making homemade hard tack and playing Power/Utilities/Rent Roulette," but then I always remind myself that no, I'd be dead of the cognitive dissonance and sexism, and double-check the scars I still have to prove it.
Otherwise, though, I don't tell myself "It could be worse" to make myself feel better. I KNOW it could, that others are even worse off than I, and that's why I have no more mercy on the rich, the upper-middle and the middle-class who traduce and exploit us. I'm probably too inhibited to ever shed blood - but I KNOW why the bourgeois go to the guillotine too, with the aristos, and have ever since the day in 2003 when I looked at the bank I was passing by and thought "I should try to knock it off - if I get arrested, at least they'll feed me" and was only dissuaded by fear of prison rape...