Job Search - Part 3

The Miasma of Disappointment

The United States is a country of vast wealth and opportunities, which make the dilapidated areas feel that much more marginal. It is a statistical fact that virtually every measure which increases the quality of life of the most fortunate increases the range of inequality, even when it doesn’t increase the Gini coefficient or shift the Lorenz curve (or affect other social/economic measures of inequality). This is a rich country, which means that the only people who starve to death here are in the grips of anorexic delusion. It means that even the poorest folks have access to high-cost emergency surgeries and own cell phones and cars and huge TV’s. It means that we are at much greater risk of the ailments of abundance-overdose, obesity-than from any accident or deprivation.

Poverty in the U.S. isn’t really about systemic factors or trade deals or A.I. It is on the national level of course. When considering groups of millions all kinds of structural factors have salience. Those factors have very little effect in the daily lives of most people though. During policy debates folks often treat income quintiles as if they’re fixed categories, like floors in a building which has no stairways. This is a welcome narrative for those who wish to elide the daily experiences and common causes of American poverty, of course. In fact, most people in this country start out (relatively) poor and slowly move up toward the second or first quintile as they approach their mid-50’s. Immigration status, medical emergency, structural economic shifts-all can knock a person right out of the ranks of the fiscally solvent. There are far more prominent causes of poverty though and they are bound up with (surprise!) choices and behaviors and attitudes. To acknowledge the realities that opportunity is plentiful and poverty often a factor of antisocial behavior or personal deficiencies is to minimize the idea that the poor are victims who must be saved by the rich-by the elect, by college educated New York Times readers who have fixed ideas about compassion and justice and who prefer to remain untroubled by the nature of the messy and brutal (but often fair) desserts of the real world. The dynamic sorting of who is poor and who is not is a constant and inter-generational process which rewards responsibility, intelligence, social fluency, luck, and station of birth (roughly in that order).

This is not an essay about the dynamic factors of poverty in the U.S. though. It is, rather, a collection of scribbled reflections accumulated while I have journeyed near and through the margins of American life for over 15 years. They are places in which the worldview of ‘social justice’ is almost completely absent. I suspect that’s because these ideas (1) do not easily survive contact with reality and (2) delude and enfeeble the believer. As a poor person in America you can usually afford to cultivate only one weakness: gluttony, sexual promiscuity, social anxiety, laziness, addiction, etc. Any more than one will put you on a collision course with disaster, and no one wants ‘silly and abstract concepts of economics & human psychology’ to be their weakness. I myself can’t think of a lamer and less gratifying one. Such ideas are luxuries of the status-obsessed, and poor people are less attendant to status. We’re generally more interested in money… or, more precisely, the things which money can buy in the short term. We may be running a different software than non-profit executives and IT managers, but we’re not fools. And we are resilient.

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The United States is full of districts which have been saturated by the foolishness and impulsiveness and disappointment of decades of daily life. Even in such places there remain homes and businesses-sometimes entire blocks-which greet the morning sun with happiness and busy themselves with the labor of life: union workers and hair salons and school buses and athletic facilities and dentist offices and 12-step meetings full of hopeful and contented people living their lives. The miasma of disappointment makes itself apparent, though. In such places you will find security guards in the pharmacy and watchful, wary immigrant proprietors in the gas station. The corner stores stay occupied all night-young men sitting on bikes or the curb out front. The houses are smaller and shabbier and there are apartment blocs (which are much rarer in the prosperous suburbs). The stores are smaller as well, and they occupy older buildings, which are often in mild disrepair. Trash is much more common along the streets and in the lots-not because rich neighborhoods have some kind of special trash collection service but because rich people generally don’t litter. Rich people are better about collecting their trash and going to work and planning for the future, and that is one reason (among many, no doubt) that they’re rich.

The disappointed areas are less safe and shabbier and there is certainly some rudeness and resentment but the strongest odor is of disappointment: a rueful dissatisfaction at life for dealing the person a bad hand and (more often) at himself or herself for making those bad decisions: not paying attention in school, impregnating that woman, taking that first hit, squandering that money. The idea that frugality or sexual discretion are important to achieving a middle-class life is a notion sure to elicit scoffs and head-shaking from the elect (who know a great deal about poverty, from graduate sociology courses) but the stories of the poor usually involve such trends or inflections and they often prove to be definitive. Social science data ruthlessly bears this out as well. If you graduate some college and avoid participation in the creation of an illegitimate child and avoid criminal conviction your chance of ending up poor poor is less than 1% (regardless of race or background). Life, ultimately, is simply a series of decisions. The disappointment can be felt everywhere: disappointment at lives wasted and people hurt. It just lies much thicker on the ground in these (poorer) places.

Disappointment is intimately connected to the criminal justice system: jail (and then prison) is society’s box, built for the makers of monumentally bad decisions. Poverty rarely generates criminality; addiction and impulsiveness and uncontrolled aggression generate criminality. Disappointment SOAKS the cells and mess halls of our penal facilities. It floats around neck-high, so thick that you fear you might drown. Sometimes you see a classroom or hear a guy on the phones or catch rays of sun through the bars and the eternal reality of hope (of redemption) overpowers the smell of disappointment but those moments are fleeting and not available to everyone. There are many thousands of people in prison who will never leave while they’re alive, who will “dance forever with the devil on a cold cell block” in the words of one of NYC’s most lyrical hip hop artists. Jails and prisons and rehabs are the loci of disappointment. It spreads outward, in wispy tendrils, from such places.

Some of the men raised in poverty lack a solid program to apply to life and so they survive by parasitism or drug-dealing or antisocial behavior but even these men get older and grow tired (lives of crime are usually only attractive to the very impulsive and very young and very male). The disappointment is strongest among them. If they have created children along the way their relationships are usually strained or nonexistent; defining identity features contained in 2 photos on a jail pad bulletin board (near the sink and the desk). If they have not created children the disappointment is still greater. Such men are at the highest risk (by far) of suicide of any cohort in our country. Until then they mend their ways with the passage of time (just enough to survive)-or they don’t. They perform the work of warehouses and road crews and automobile maintenance. Their manhood is precious to them. For many, eventually, it’s really all they have.

The more deliberate and less antisocial men might find their way to a blue collar job and do okay. These men are the guardians of the disappointed areas, helping to prevent predation and to raise the boys in their homes and nearby-but there are simply too few of them. Millions are lost to prison or addiction (two social realities which overlap massively).

The children are children: living their sunny and semi-oblivious lives as they seemingly do everywhere on Earth. They don’t really sense the fog of disappointment because their world is, by definition, completely normal (for them). As they age the disappointment around them and the petty tragedies of their home lives sometimes snare them and throw them into the maelstrom, over years or all at once. They are exposed to more crime and violence and ‘drama’ than safer and richer kids and these differences can be seen in the aggregate but for most they’re just neighborhood quirks. All of these children have a feasible, yet often still merely theoretical, path to the wealthy districts, through homework and ambition and farsightedness… but children are rarely farsighteded. It is a profound tragedy that perspective and wisdom must be paid for in time and suffering and by then it’s often too late.

The women are the bedrock of the disappointed territories. Less prone to impulsivity or physical aggression and usually determined to brighten their homes and make their money and support their families, they navigate the shoals of dysfunction as skillfully as they can. Romance is often a great source of suffering for these women, but it is the suffering of betrayed hopes and exploitation rather than the suffering of aimlessness or violence. It is disappointment from a different experiential vantage point. They bathe in the same waters of shallow consumerism and foolish attachment as all other Americans but they still rise every morning and feed their kids and drive their cars to the nursing home or the cell phone store to begin work. Their heroism is rarely noted but they have raised most of an entire generation… alone.

Disappointment can be found almost anywhere. It has been a frequent companion, during this and previous job searches. Divorcee receptionists and undereducated managers and shabby waiting rooms and noisy, superheated warehouses and VA waiting rooms and animal shelters and basketball courts and DMV’s-I’ve seen disappointment in all of them. It’s simply more concentrated in certain places and, in rich neighborhoods, it hides behind landscaping and the facades of nice homes and gleaming corporate lobbies. In such places it’s easy to forget the worlds of pain mere miles away.

I meditate upon the precincts of disappointment because it is the defining feature of American poverty, as I see it. It’s not lack of schools or lack of food or lack of anything (except character, and ambition). Indian reservations have well-paid teachers brought in. Local residents serve as familiar and trusted police officers. Food and housing and stipends are provided by the federal government-and these places are miserable. You can say that they’re miserable because their cultures have been denuded and their young people lack dreams or productive habits-but then we’re saying the same things using different words. Government programs cannot sustain communities or imbue kids with drive or character. The reservations are suffering because of centuries of profound disappointment, so much that it often chokes the human beauty and potential, like a weed.

There are different ideas about poverty (its causes and solutions) but poverty is (usually) a spiritual and existential condition as well as an economic one. Like all spiritual conditions there are causes of poverty, often rooted in sin and choices and pain-and there are effects. The pain, once visited upon the sufferer, doesn’t disappear but spreads out-like stow-throw ripples in a pond-into other homes and lives and onward into the future. Perhaps the fact that the rich do not want to consider the choices and behaviors which generate so much poverty isn’t totally bad; struggling to find the most charitable explanation for the suffering of another can indicate compassion. In this case I suspect that it usually indicates mere ignorance and privilege, though. You can learn about poverty on the campuses of private universities or in Netflix documentaries or the pages of the New York Times (although not the existential dimension of poverty which is bound up in personal choices and is the main generator of pain). Why should that be necessary though? You’re almost never more than ten minutes by car from a poor neighborhood in this country. The persistence of fantasies and illusions to this degree indicates to me that these (richer) people have no contact with poverty. THERE is the meanness of spirit. They will vote for massive new federal agencies… but never help anyone. They will complain about minority public school test scores.. and jealously guard the enrollment precincts and college chances of their kids. They will read about poverty-about lack and difficulty and disappointment-and they will understand nothing because they don’t really want to see. They avoid our neighborhoods. Because of naïveté? Guilt? Fear? I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that they never venture onto the rougher blocks. That’s understandable though-no one wants to confront the suffering of the world, or the disappointment of wasted lives.

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