The new poor have no idea how to negotiate daily life
without money. It is all new to
them. Their problems are compounded by
the bourgeois habits and the middle-class ideas that they cannot seem to give
up. For example, I recently met a man
who has been homeless since declaring bankruptcy four years ago. I asked him whether he had applied for GA
(General Assistance, a $400 per month cash payment, which is all that's left of
welfare). He said that he had not
because he would not qualify because he owns a car. I believe that my mouth actually fell open in
the moment of silence it took before I could gather my wits together again and
ask "Well, why don't you sell it?"
His answer: "I need reliable
transportation to get to work." He
hasn't worked in four years.
It gets worse. His
car is a Jaguar for which he paid $42,000.
"I would only get, like, $5000 for it, and I can't do that. It's stupid."
Four years of enduring the vagaries of street life have not
relieved this man of his crippling attachment to possessions and to the social
status which those possessions denote. Of
course even the rich are owned by their possessions, a fact that runs counter
to thee belief that money buys freedom and happiness. And this man's case reveals how deep the
servitude to objects can run. He clings
to that Jaguar as if it were a life raft that will keep him afloat until he can
be rescued or until he washes ashore on a habitable island. He thinks -- I am quite sure -- that if only
people could see him driving around town in his Jag, he would no longer have to
begin every new acquaintanceship by explaining himself, by trying to make every
new person whom he encounters see that his current situation is not part of his
"real" life..
The new poor have the tendency to think that the solution to
their problems is to return as quickly as possible to the life they used to
lead. They cast about for a job that
pays what they used to earn so that they can have the kind of house, car, and
wardrobe that they used to own. They
soon find that no such jobs are forthcoming.
They tally their losses and worry over them like rosary beads (Jaguar,
Chief Operations Officer, luxury condo in Laguna Beach, NYU, flying from New
York to Paris for the weekend, season tickets for the opera). When you meet the new poor, they very soon
recite the list of their possessions (which they no longer possess) and the
positions they held in their past career, noting their professional
achievements (e.g. Number One in Corporate Sales for Apple in the Southern
California Region) as if these were the Stations of a Cross which they now
bear.
What they cannot bear is the sense they have of their own
invisibility. They want those who look
at them to see a success, a valuable member of society, who despite recent
losses is still the same person -- the same middle-class person -- as before. This attachment to a lost middle-class
identity cannot help these people in their new life. In fact, their inability to cast off the husk
of bourgeois identity hinders them from discovering the possibilities of their
new appendages, those soggy, limp growths on their backs that -- if they could
only wriggle free from the shell of their old personhood -- could be spread out
in the sun and become a power that would allow them to fly. Caught up in who they used to be, they cannot
accept who they are.
They cannot accept that the poor on whom they used to look
down are their brothers and sisters.
Instead they become more prejudiced -- more racist, more classist --
than ever. They trumpet their disrespect
for the Have Nots because it proves the truth which they have been trying to
explain, namely that they are "really" Haves. And so they alienate themselves from their
true community and inevitably from their true selves. Encased in memories that now function as
nothing more than delusions, locked up in the prison of middle-class values,
they cannot enter fully into their new -- their real -- life.
