A Big Enough Umbrella

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 13:24:49 GMT

Sybyl is now on a high protein/low carb diet, so I dropped off a case of Fancy Feast and a 10 lb. bag of her old dried cat food with Lois Lane.

Literacy Lollapalooza lost a chunk of its grant money.

Not that big a chunk but enough so that they cut Lois Lane’s hours down to 20 a week—which is insane because Lois Lane is actually the only employee there who actually does anything remotely related to the nonprofit’s mission statement; the rest of the staff is paid to hunt down and shake various money trees. She still oversees approximately 70 clients receiving literacy services as well as 25 tutors providing them, and she teaches two English-as-a-Second-Language classes.

In other words, she hasn’t cut back on anything she does; she’s just not getting paid for most of it.

And Billy was diagnosed with diabetes six months ago and has lost eighty-five pounds, but his blood sugar still hasn’t stabilized because Metformin isn’t the right drug for him but his insurance won’t pay for the drug that might actually work. He can only work erratically because he’s so ill.

She laughed when she opened her refrigerator to show me how empty it is. “On the plus side, I am losing weight! Mainly because I can’t afford to eat!”

She is now working three (count ’em) jobs, and she can barely cover their rent.

I was dismayed.

About the only thing I can do for her is bring her a big bag of veggies every week.

This is more help than it may seem to be—one of the great paradoxes of being diabetic and being poor in this country is that you can only afford cheap processed foods, which are absolutely the wrong thing to eat if you’re a diabetic.

But it’s not enough help.

“You’d be better off quitting Literacy Lollapalooza and going to work for Stop & Shop,” I told her. “They’re hiring. I think they start at $19 an hour.”

“I’m considering it,” she said. “Clearly, this is not sustainable.”

She wasn’t teary or sunk into any slough of self-pitying desperation while I was there.

In fact, she was as cheerful as I’ve ever seen her.

It’s not that adversity agrees with her exactly. I think it’s more that Lois Lane is the one person I know whose childhood was actually more horrific than my own, so when things start going south, she’s back in familiar territory.

I wish I had an umbrella large enough to shelter all the people I care about from the shitstorm that’s on its way, that’s already here for a lot of people.

But I simply don’t.

In fact, I can’t even be sure that my umbrella is big enough to shelter me.

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What I've Learned From Section 8 Housing Complexes

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 12:00:02 GMT

Yesterday, the National Counting Project put me on Section 8 Housing detail.

I fuckin’ hate Section 8 Housing detail.

By this point, we’ve papered practically all the Section 8 Housing complexes up and down East Market so that when you knock on occupants’ doors, they start screaming at you: You were here yesterday! And the day before! Fuck you! You’re a pain in the ass.

And we’ll be back tomorrow, I think grimly. (Although hopefully not me personally.) And we’ll keep on coming back for another month because sadly, that’s the law. And all you have to do to stop us from coming back is to talk to us for five minutes.

A sizeable percentage of the tenants in these places must be on food stamps and Medicaid. And the National Counting Project is the way the federal government figures out how much to allocate in matching grants to help subsidize these assistance programs.

I would just love to deliver a little civics lesson to each and every one of these yahoos but that’s wayyyy above my pay grade plus I don’t think they’d understand it.

The Section 8 people have a very childlike idea of money: I think they think the government just prints money, and when the government runs out, they just print more. (Of course, these days, they’re not entirely wrong.)

They hate the government.

Of course, the National Counting Project also determines Congressional representation, but I’m fairly certain no one in these Section 8 Housing blocks votes although I did espy a couple of Trump stickers on cars:

The great delusion of the Democrats seems to be that if you focus voter turnout activities on populations like these, you will increase the likelihood that Democrats will be elected.

I wonder if that’s true?

My own feeling, of course, is that America’s two political parties are practically interchangeable in terms of moral corruption, ineptitude and general creepiness, but LBJ is the one who pushed through all that social legislation in the early 60s, so “The War on Poverty” is forever associated with the Democrats.

Arguably, Democrats do more for the poor than Republicans do.

If people bother to vote at all, though—and that’s a big “if”—a sizeable portion of them will not vote according to their own economic best interests.

Here’s the deal:

Uneducated people like bullies. And poor people are the ones most likely to be uneducated.

Particularly, they like bullies who are going after individuals that the uneducated people would like to be going after themselves—which is to say, people with education.

Uneducated people identify with these bullies.

There’s an even division between Black and white in these Section 8 Housing complexes. Maybe the Trump stickers were all on cars owned by whites. Again, I don’t know. I wasn’t doing political canvasing.

What I do know is that there was no sign of Black Lives Matter. Knots of Black young men gathered on cracked cement porches, puffing on cigarettes, gesticulating madly at one another, eyeing me warily—but I didn’t get close enough to eavesdrop on their conversations.

Only one person said anything even remotely political to me. He was a burly Black guy who opened his door after my second round of vigorous rapping and glared at me.

“You tell me why I should do this,” he sneered.

I decided to look upon this as an invitation to recite the many virtues of the National Counting Project!

“Yeah?” he said. “Yeah? But, see, here’s the deal—I don’t vote.”

And he slammed the door in my face.

Leaving me to wonder whether he didn’t vote by choice, or he didn’t vote because he’s an X-felon.

New York actually does let former felons vote. I wondered if I should knock again on his door to inform him of this.

But decided against it.

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Mallory's Camera

A Big Enough Umbrella

What I've Learned From Section 8 Housing Complexes