Yule,
It’s not my story. But I sure do understand it now.
“IHere’s how I slipped from the middle class into near poverty, and what I’m doing about it ” by Karen Datko
It’s amazing how quickly you can lose everything. Especially when you’re not farther up middle class. You keep thinking that things will get better. But most of the time, it doesn’t. You get used to living off minimum wage.
The good news is that you stop thinking that someone who likes doing this low-end job is somehow morally suspect. The job doesn’t fit me, it doesn’t use what I have to offer. But I can stock shelves, dust merchandise and handle all the old people who come in.
I don’t do that any more, of course. I sit in a windowless office and work on a computer. Yes, I really have an office. Well, okay, I don’t actually have an office but I sit in one. It’s belongs to another group but they don’t seem to ever use it so I’m a squatter. And my computer is an unsupported OS that no one else wanted. (I like it, to be honest.) And there are days when my human interaction is saying “hi” to the receptionist at the door, who always waves at me. She’s polite and friendly.
Not great work. Not enabling billion dollar trades. Not managing multiple groups. Not the multi-million dollar budget.
But it pays better than anything else I’ve seen in the last four years. Even that CEO job, especially not if you consider cost of living.
Of course, I started post university at minimum wage, no benefits, back in the old Bush days. I’m not sure how I made it. I ate bread and butter for lunch a lot. But I still went out with my friends now and then.
I remember being in a Sunday School adult class years later at a church in Chicago where the leader, a great guy who just doesn’t understand our lives, said that well, no one in this room went hungry this week because they didn’t have food. Except that my buddy in the back had because he had lost his job in retail and lived hand to mouth on minimum wage in Chicago. I remember not eating in Belgium because we only had $10k to live on in a city that was 50% more expensive to live in than Chicago. I told him to always come buy, or call me. I’m always good for a free meal.
My mother was retelling the story this week about how her father, who had a high-school degree he went back for, left his good paying job as a butcher to go to bible college and become a dirt poor Baptist minister. She told of people who would come by looking for a meal, and my grandmother (also a minister) always fed them, even though they would sometimes pray for their next meal because quite simply the cupboards were bare.
“People didn’t talk about your father because he had earned a lot of money,” she said. “They came because he ministered.”
There are times when it is easy to forget what really matters. Or at least what really matters to me. I know that for many people having an upper middle class house in a gated community is what matters. That’s great: they probably drive the economy. But I guess what mattered to me at my dad’s death was the number of people who came out just to tell me about him, to tell me how he had affected them, how he had served them.
I remember being at the factory in Toledo, when I was his summer intern. One of the union guys who worked in my dad’s area had a son whom I had known. While I was at college, he killed himself. My dad had gone to the funeral and the wake because you don’t go because you knew the dead guy: you go for the living.
That guy would talk to me a good bit out on the floor. One day he just looked off and said, “your dad is good people.”
My dad, beloved by the union guys in what was the workplace with the most acrimonious labor relations of anywhere I’ve worked.
Maybe, in the end, it won’t matter that I dropped the ball, that I let the brass ring pass me by because I thought we were going one direction which then didn’t work out. Maybe there’s redemption for living without insurance, of being afraid to get tested for things because you can’t afford to treat it. A friend of mine lived in a commie prison for years. Another’s family suffered real persecution under the government next door. Neither dropped the faith.
The official poverty line for a one person household, Datko writes, is $9,800. I’ve usually been above that. I have friends who aren’t. And she’s right: for the most part, things aren’t going to return. You don’t get your old job back. After awhile, you can’t. And if you’re too big for the manager’s job, you won’t be climbing up a ladder either.
But you can live. And you can serve in the war against the Evil One. It’s hard duty, and maybe in the end it’s thoroughly thankless. Maybe there won’t be anyone waiting on the other side of the veil to welcome you with “well done, my good and faithful servant.” Maybe this is all there is.
Even so, I’ll still rather live in the oppression with the Israelites than enjoy the sins of a season in Pharaoh’s courts. Maybe that’s because, as so many of my advisers have noted, I’ve got personality deficiencies. Maybe that’s why I’ll stay and fight when the folks with sense and reputations fly.
Anyway, a great little piece about what it’s like to fall down and not get back up. Take a read if the censors let it through.