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What Rich People Don’t Know about Being Poor: Continual stress

I have long wanted to write a series on what rich people do not seem to understand about being poor in America. The reason I have not posted in so long touches on the first one about which I meant to write, climate control.

But this one is about something happening in my life today: the impossibility of coping with the nonstop stress of poverty.

First, I need to define some terms. When I use the phrase “rich person,” I will mean someone who never has to worry about paying for the necessities of life. There is always enough money to buy basic food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and every other basic survival need for themselves and everyone else in their household. Such people usually have enough funds to indulge in conspicuous consumption.

“Poor people” are those for whom there just isn’t enough money to cover all the survival needs. It excludes people who can do so by means of a careful budget, even though such budgets are all but impossible to keep in practice. I guess those humans would be called “average people,” although there are now so few of them in the United States that the phrase is losing its meaning there. “Poor people” don’t have a budget because a budget is meaningless. Whenever they get any money, it immediately goes out for whichever of their survival needs is most pressing at that moment.

Further, there’s nothing poor people can do to get more income. Yes, I know many people don’t believe that’s ever possible, but it is for a lot of us. In my case, my Aspie indiosyncracies (which I cannot change) make me unemployable in the American workplace (which needs to change drastically if it’s not going to drive all the non-rich people insane), and depression makes it impossible for me to carry on many basic life functions. (And just for the record, most people disabled by depression became so while still working, so making work criteria to keep things like SNAP because “unemployment leads to depression” are putting the cart before the horse.)

Naturally enough, living the way poor people must is extremely stressful. It literally never stops. While they’re awake, they are always anxious not only about whether there will be enough money to keep them just slightly below water and whether any unforeseen losses are going to suddenly appear in their lives. They’re trying to find ways to make do with nothing (not just less). When they’re asleep, they’re having anxiety dreams about not having enough money to keep them just slightly below water, having unending unexpected expenses, and what happens when those things happen.

Restful, it’s not. I have never had very many happy dreams (I can go even a decade without one), but once I couldn’t cover basic expenses, the anxiety dreams got worse because the things in them could so easily happen. When I had just barely enough money (it was a brief period in my life), I had dreams in which things that a part of my mind knew were ridiculous happened. My loathed biomom is not going to ever be able to force me to live with her again, for example. In those dreams, the “watcher” part of my brain repeatedly said, “Yeah, yeah, this is a dream. It’s never gonna really happen.”

Now that there’s never enough money, nearly all the dream events could happen. I am forced to buy things without money and go so deeply in debt that I can never get out—which quite probably has already happened—and debtors’ prison has been re-instituted, only in the United States this time—which is frightening possible. Or I die suddenly—pretty likely actually—and my sister and the dogs end up on the street and tortured to death—none of which is preposterous either.

So after many nights of not-sleep, poor people find themselves strung tighter than a violin, which can at least make lovely music in the right hands. There’s nothing lovely about what follows, however. The people try to hold it together. They know they are trying to balance on a knife edge, with certain disaster if the balance is upset, just as with a cargo of shock-sensitive explosives. Tiny things inevitably happen—they break a dish, they spill all the orange juice they got from Meals on Wheels all over the place, the dogs insist on trying to help in all such minor mess-ups—and these beings overstuffed with concentrated stress just cannot contain the explosion.

[Insert your favorite onomatopoeia for a huge, resounding noise—or several of them—here.]

The fallout, of course, only makes things worse for the now exploded person. It frightens dogs, bystanding humans, themselves. Depending on how much self-control they have left, physical violence may not happen, but then again it might. And that’s when tiny things happen (which might happen several times in one day). When the big things happen—say, a dog on a walk has an encounter with a skunk, the dog has a passionate adversion to being bathed, and a trip to the grocery store (always a trauma) is vitally necessary…. Well, no one should have to live like this. No one can contain the stress forever, and eventually all reasonable methods for doing so fail.

That’s what drives so many humans to unreasonble methods for dealing with stress. Mine is overeating, but it’s this that makes people break down and become addicts of various chemical substances or become outwardly violent. I haven’t done either yet, but I have sometimes been nearly overwhelmed by the desire to just turn it all off for even a second or just strike out at whatever is currently upsetting me (and I’ve been a pacifist since adolescence).

Fortunately for me, I have had the foresight not to keep any alcohol in the house, I lack the social skills required to obtain street drugs, and I have a life-long commitment to nonviolence (helped along by the knowledge that I’m more likely to get hurt than anyone else if I start anything). Hence the overeating. Sadly, most people at least have the social skills; they may even be offered drugs without seeking them. They may (instead or also) have a lower inhibition to violence (particularly if it was modeled by a parent in their childhood home). I can completely understand how someone could lose sight of the future harm such actions can bring in the blinding blaze of a little relief now. (Hence, again, the overeating.)

That’s why criminalization will never significantly work to fight addiction or violence. People’s lives have to be de-stressed before resisting such urges can even be discussed. The human nervous system, neurotypical or not, can only handle so much.

Unfortunately for countries in which Anglo culture dominates, compassion is actively discouraged in such places. Humans are all presumed to have nearly the same abilities and nearly the same childhoods and nearly the same level of background stress, and so they must all conform to certain standards without exception. This is the sacred principle of the ruling powers in the United States, and it is just so obviously rot to anyone who takes a second look that I wonder that anyone actually does believe it. I suspect it is because ruling powers always have a strong vested interest in the status quo that alone makes it possible for this notion to pass basic scrutiny with anyone.

To steal a line from the admittedly utopian Camelot (the text by Alan Jay Lerner), violence is not strength and compassion is not weakness. If the United States are ever to have a realizable future, all Americans have to get their minds around these truths now. If we don’t, we’ve already defeated ourselves.

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Dissenting Opinion

An antithesis how?

[NB: I put colors used as races of humans in quotation marks. Barring genetic rarities, humans actually only come in one color—brown—of which we are all various shades, and the shades overlap the lines of race. I grant race as a sociological construct, but it is one that we need to dismantle pronto. We need to all start thinking of ourselves as various shades of brown rather than any of these inaccurate colors, and I’m hoping to remind everyone of that every time they see the scare quotes.]

A few days ago, when I started this post, my sister forwarded me an article from the BBC’s site about a Ugandan broadcaster apologizing for showing one of its employees wearing an “All Live Matter” T-shirt on the air.

It said that:

The phrase All Lives Matter is often deemed as an antithesis to the
Black Lives Matter campaign that highlights systemic discrimination of
black people.

HUH?!

Given that “black” lives are by definition a subset of all lives, how can All Lives Matter possibly be an antithesis?

I grant that “black” lives are greatly devalued in current American society (for example, lynching was only recently made illegal) and that the bias goes far back, almost as long as there have been Europeans in the Western Hemisphere. They may well be the most discriminated against, too. I think the First Nations might argue with that, and discrimination against them has been going on since before Europeans first brought Africans to American shores. I am willing to stipulate that, however, to continue with the points of the argument that I think are of more concern.

And certainly what rational human being thinks kneeling on someone’s neck is an acceptable form of restraint? So very many vital systems come together there that there are probably more ways to kill someone by kneeling on their neck than kneeling on any other part of their body! As a form of execution, sure, very effective (although still not acceptable), but not as a form of restraint! Then when I found out that Mr. Floyd was not the first person to be so killed and yet the practice went on . . . well, words are not sufficient for some levels of horror.

But surely the whole impetus behind Black Lives Matter is that All Lives Matter. “Black” lives—and any other subset of all lives—matter precisely because all lives matter. And to put any specific adjective on the lives that matter implies that there are lives that don’t matter or at least matter less: otherwise, where is the need to specify? That plays right into the hands of the Some Lives Don’t Matter crowd, which is the real enemy of us all (even of themselves). Even those few  who don’t have some attribute that is currently on someone’s list of those who don’t matter may someday find themselves on one.

Also specifying lives that do matter makes the job piecemeal. For instance, at some point Irish lives Didn’t Matter, but then they did, while many, many other lives—at the time, Asian, “black,” First Nations, Latino, and many others—were still on the Don’t Matter list. And most of those still are. If we do it one group at a time, it will take centuries more to go through the list, and it is much easier for the Some Don’t Matter people to return previously removed groups to it in the same piecemeal way. Certainly with the intolerant group in the Executive Branch at present, that is more than a hypothetical possibility.

It also allows the intolerant to set up false dichotomies of the “black”/”blue” or “black”/”white” sort, pitting individual groups against each other (and those unfortunates in both groups against both). If we say All Lives Matter and refuse to acknowledge that in order for one group to gain Mattering, another must lose, the Some Don’t Matter group loses their most used and useful weapon. That alone would be a great benefit to everyone (even the Some Don’t Matter bunch, but they don’t have long-enough vision to see that).

We should all have each other’s backs against the Some Don’t Matter crowd. Whenever they do something to indicate that any lives don’t matter or at least matter less, we should all be standing up, facing them saying, “All Lives Matter!”

So that’s what I will go on saying. The last thing it does is serve the interests of anyone who wants anyone not to matter.

Categories
Wail of Despair

Starting in the middle . . .

I am going to start sort of in the middle: the precipitating event. I’ll fill in the background later. This is going to be rather incoherent, but that’s the way the neurotypical world is, so I suppose it’s appropriate that my account of it be so as well.

My sister got denied in her appeal for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).

And the judge’s decision was ludicrous to anyone who knows anything about Asperger syndrome. (Yeah, I know that name is controversial. I have my reasons for preferring it, and as an Aspie myself, I’m entitled to make the choice. I’ll cover the reasons when I get to the background.) Everything he (the judge) listed as evidence that my sister doesn’t have Asperger’s was in fact evidence that she did!

She held a job and then went to college? Sure she did: part time for both because she couldn’t cope with full time. She never did either full time at any point in her adult life. And when she held a job, it was as nonsocial as possible. For most of her working life, she telecommuted. She’s never done anything social since she gave up the anime club back in the early nineties. She once hid in a locked server room so that her co-workers couldn’t pressure her to join an office lunch. The key to the room was provided on a limited basis; as a techie, she qualified and they didn’t.

She clearly is capable of coherent thought? Sure she is. Coherence of thought isn’t a problem in Aspies. Social cues and interaction, nonverbal communication (including facial expressions, voice tones, body language), slowness of processing (particularly social and emotional stuff), inability to cope with a “fast-paced, dynamic environment,” that is the kind of stuff that indicates an Aspie in the neurotypical midst.

Her doctors say that she is (a) autistic and (b) depressed, but there is no evidence of either? As reputable physicians, their statements are evidence, as is the evidence they cite in their reports as a basis for those statements. And since he clearly doesn’t know what he’s looking for, he’d do better to take their word for it than rely on himself.

But her lawyers say it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know a damn thing about the condition of which he’s judging the existence or nonexistence. The Social Security Administration has blessed him to make these decisions, so we’re not allowed to question his competence. It also doesn’t matter that my sister would not be able to make it through an interview at all, let alone successfully enough to get a job. It doesn’t matter that the whole process is biased against people who can’t show up to plead their case because—guess what?—we don’t function well at anything real time.

Everything that should matter doesn’t.

The case now will be passed to a bunch of lawyers who will judge if the law was correctly applied, not whether the judge was an ignorant loon who should’ve bothered to learn a few things before he started pontificating from on high. So long as the judge correctly applied the law, it doesn’t matter that his ruling is a sterling example of ignorance regarding autism and what it is and what it is not. We’ve got ten business days to submit more evidence (and we can’t get to an autism expert in that timeframe and we’re told that probably wouldn’t help even if we could), and then in a year the bunch of lawyers will almost certainly tell my sister that she’s out of luck until she’s sixty-seven. Like she will make it to sixty at this rate. The stress is unquestionably destroying her.

It’s her last shot. To apply again, she has to go back to work first. She hasn’t worked in over a decade now because she was going to school and then taking care of me and then falling apart while taking care of me. After the past seven and a half years, a period of at best low horror for both of us, there’s just no way. Absolutely none.

Attempting to function in the neurotypical world, a world made by and for people entirely not like us, is much more stressful than it is for neurotypicals, for whom it is made and by whom it is constantly re-made in manners that shut us out. I grant that there is no malice aforethought in the shutting us out, but that doesn’t change the effect. After holding part-time jobs while in school since I was fifteen and then full time for twenty-five years thereafter, I collapsed when I was forty-eight. That’s why my sister’s been taking care of me. And that’s why she cracked at a slightly earlier age than I did. She’s now fifty-one, but she hasn’t been really functional for years and it’s getting worse all the time.

Part of my collapse was physical issues, but I was almost relieved they happened. Going out and about is hard on autistics. Just going outside of our home is at best unpleasant: we get assaulted by all our neurotypical neighbors’ attempts to interact with us. Yes, we know they think they’re being friendly. They’re not. Assault is not too strong a word. If we try to make that clear to them, however, they all agree that we are the ones being bad neighbors.

So when I couldn’t walk far enough to do any errands (I’ve never been able to drive and we don’t have a car), my sister had to do it. People have been telling me for years that my sister is a leech on my SSDI benefits, but what they don’t get is that it’s the reverse. Even if you don’t agree with socialism—I do, but even if you don’t—I’m the one who is a parasite on her. I’m using her lack of income to force her to go out and do all the outside errands of our household.

Granted, I have no alternative, but’s so very hard on her. From infancy to her mid twenties, I never her saw her cry. One event then made her cry, and again I didn’t see her do it for nearly twenty-five years more. Then slowly but surely, she became less and less able to cope with the errands. First, she had to give up going to food pantries. I used to go to them, and really, folks, they’re an autistic’s vision of hell: loud, packed with humans, with those humans and various objects whizzing around unpredictably. And oh, yes, the humans use the line as a captive audience. There they are, shouting in her face about whatever they want an audience for, and she can’t escape because we need food. She came home in tears several times before we mutually called a halt.

Trips to the grocery store were rough, but she managed by going before 7 a.m. on a weekday. But with the COVID-19 lockdown, every open time at the grocery store was packed. It was the pantry all over again, only this time with distraught and frightened people fighting over a few supplies. And I’m sorry, but Instacart is awfully expensive as well as just plain awful. And she and I haven’t forgotten that Walmart nearly single-handedly destroyed the American economy, even if everyone else seems to have. We are certainly not going to shop through them! Poverty has forced us to give up a lot of our values, but that makes us all the more determined to hold onto the few we’ve managed to continue to live.

All she’s asking is that they essentially allow her to retire early. That’s it. I got that because I determined early in life that my desperation was never going to be quiet and so it never was. I am documented all the way back to the Bad Old Days (euphemistically known as “our childhood”). Suicide attempt; big scenes with our bio-mom, my teachers, my employers, authority figures of many and various sorts; psychoactives all the way back to the mid eighties—check, for all of ’em! My sister figured (and my example may have helped her reach this conclusion) it would be easier to just fly under the radar and try to pass unnoticed. If people didn’t notice her, they wouldn’t bother her.

And she had this thing about being labeled “disabled.” Me, I figured it is bogus at its basis—I’m only “dis” because I live in a world in which I am an aberration rather than the rule—and damn it, I’ve more than earned the few advantages it brings me. It’s not like they even compensate for the horror of sticking out among a herd species. (No, not pack species, herd species. We’ll get into that later, too!) But my sister felt differently and avoided getting so labeled.

And now that she can’t hide it anymore and has to own it and needs to ask the rest of the world to finally give her a little slack, and they won’t do it. They accuse her of being lazy and greedy (which is another angry laugh—she’s always lived very happily on the very little her part-time work brought her and I never understood how!). She has literally (and I do know the meaning of that word) tried every other option, and SSDI is all that is left.

As I write this, she’s hiding up in her room. She’s come down a couple times to eat, but she just keeps staying up there. Her room isn’t dog safe so her dogs can’t go in there, so they both are getting depressed themselves for lack of mommy time. I do what I can, but my own dog is a jealous creature who often will start yapping if I just speak to the others. And while her dogs both like me, the whole time I’m trying to give them a cuddle and get mine to be quiet, they’re letting me know that I am not Mommy and that they expect me to get Mommy to come out and cuddle them already.

I don’t know why I can’t believe all this but I can’t. I mean, it took me years to figure out that neurotypicals view the world very oddly and seem adverse to basic rationality, but I honestly can’t believe it’s been taken to this extreme. Judges making rulings on topics they have no knowledge of; systems made to exclude the very people who need them;dooming people to death by the slow tortures of hunger, stress, and illness . . .

It boggles the mind. Even the Nazis, who didn’t want our kind anymore than modern neurotypicals do, at least created gas chambers for us and put us out of their misery quickly. Yes, the gas chambers were created and used to wipe out of Germany psychological and developmental “inferiors” long before it occurred to the Nazis to use them for their “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” No, I’m not kidding. The mentally ill, which for them included those with developmental disabilities such as autism, went first. And only a few family members protested. Many of those people’s relatives were only too happy to be relieved of the responsibility.

Sorry for the digression, but I never thought I’d think of Nazis as merciful, but . . . now I really have to wonder. My sister and I were abused children. Our disability didn’t officially exist until we were in our mid-to-late twenties so we got none of the help and training that autistic kids get today. By the time we were diagnosed (late thirties for me and late forties for her), it was too late for us to learn such things. We worked hard all our lives in a system that just tried to pound us into their idea of what people should be, but we were contributing citizens and taxpayers for as long as we could manage it. And now it looks like my sister and I are doomed to further decompensate until we end up on the streets and dead.

What kind of basic decency is that?