Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (13 page)

Okay, so we’ve established this: Poverty isn’t pretty. We
can’t afford to dress nicely. Our yards are a mess. We don’t really care about your political pet projects. But do you know what we really do care about? Each other. And I’m going to make a big leap here that I am very comfortable with: Poor people are, as a rule, a bit more generous. We understand what it might be like to have to beg even if we have never done it ourselves. In fact, there’s data to back me up. The latest research shows that people of low socioeconomic status are more likely to be altruistic than their higher-class counterparts. In 2011, the bottom 20 percent of earners gave a higher percentage of their wealth away than the top 20 percent.

I’ll put it to you this way: If good citizenship consists of a well-ordered life, then we poor people make terrible citizens. But if it means being willing to help out your fellow human beings, I’d say we’re right out in front waving a flag and waiting for everyone else to get on the bandwagon.

An Open Letter to Rich
People

D
ear Rich People,

I know that nobody understands you. I want to help. I have, for all my faults, always been rather compassionate to people who are in real pain.

I know that you understand what I mean when I say that sometimes I feel so unappreciated that I just can’t be bothered to care. See? There. I feel your pain.

So to make it easier, I have some observations, some advice. Because if there’s anything a poor person knows about, it’s how to survive in this fucked-up world.

And seriously? You people are doing it wrong.

What is it with you people and your meetings? I’ve been allowed to sit in on a few of them recently. I don’t know how you stand them. Suddenly, the insane rules you people make us live with seem inevitable. See, until I started sitting in on the meetings, I couldn’t see a single reason for programs that had contradictory rules or relief programs that were practically inhumane in their lack of realism. Now I realize it’s because every meeting results in nobody having a clue what they’ve actually done. They’ve been devoting only 10 percent of their brains to the meeting itself, the remainder being occupied with fantasies of mayhem and whatever song they last heard. Here are my observations from one such meeting:

• I’d have been fired from all my regular jobs if I made my bosses repeat themselves this much.
  
• WE HAVE BEEN OVER THIS SO MANY TIMES ALREADY!
  
• If time is money, how does this world function?
  
• Holy balls, the flattery.
  
• So many people not paying attention right now.
  
• Why are they reading the handout to us? I think everyone here can read.
  
• Is it possible that there is actually no point to this meeting?
  

I’m not kidding, rich people. You can email me for a copy of the notes.

I’ve just been sitting through meetings wondering when the work would get done. What I have discovered is this: In every one of them, someone opens by talking about how we want to be respectful of everyone’s time and right to speak, along with a plea to keep comments short. Then everyone sort of tunes out while the agenda is being read. Some talking is done by whoever is running things, mostly follow-up from the last meeting.

Then the fun begins. Someone will rise, bring up a good point. Someone else will clarify. A third will ask a relevant question. And then—and here’s the part that gets me every time—someone will ask a question that makes it perfectly clear that they weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention during the last ten minutes or so.
And nobody calls them out for it
. As long as the question or observation is worded just a little differently, it counts as a new contribution. What the fuck, rich people? Time is money, unless that time is being spent repeating things that have been established already?

Worse are the endless reassurances. “I don’t want you to think I’m opposed, because it’s a fantastic idea you had to buy ten crocodiles and set them loose in a school as a publicity stunt, but I just don’t think it’ll work for us.” Why on earth do you people not just tell each other when your ideas suck? Why the self-esteem dance? You guys, you’re allowed to have bad ideas and irrelevant points. It does not make you a terrible human being. Maybe you should just accept that and then you don’t have to cover any criticism, even the most gentle, in
five minutes of apology. Maybe we could borrow some of your apology time for our workdays, and then both of our problems would be solved.

By the end of the meeting, which inevitably has run over by at least twenty minutes, nobody is entirely sure what’s been accomplished, but everyone feels like their concerns were heard. I have come to the conclusion that business meetings are like group therapy for the wealthy. Everyone sits around looking at each other and waiting for it to be their turn to speak so that they can zone out for the remainder of the time they aren’t allowed to leave the room.

The meetings are what made me realize that you guys slack off at work too. It’s just that you don’t call it slacking off (and that you all have office doors to close so no one can see you playing solitaire or shopping online).

So, rich people, now that we’ve established that your work ethic and approach to your job are not exactly unassailable, how about you get off your high horse about how we poor people do our jobs? Also:

• Please stop equating our jobs. I am not saying that you put in no effort, that you’re not tired or overburdened or anything. I just think that we should delineate between the jobs where you can pee at will and the ones where you can’t.
  
• For the love of God, please stop telling us that outrageous salaries are justified because some people are
  just worth that much. You guys can totally pretend that anyone can possibly justify earning thousands of dollars every minute. Just stop demanding that we pretend with you, that’s all. You guys are supergood at excluding us from conversations. Maybe make that one of them. Just let me know when you start gossiping and I’ll rejoin the conversation. I bet someone got laid.
  
• Maybe you could hire us? I hear rich people complaining about being overworked. I hear poor people complaining about being unemployed. I feel like there’s a solution here. You know we work cheap, right? You could totally pay me $10 that one time to run your errands for you or write that standard report that’s a pain because it’s such rote work.
  We are highly trained in rote work.
  

This is a big one for me. See, civics is the study of citizenry, its burdens and responsibilities and privileges. It’s more than whether or not you, as a class, vote frequently. It’s about whether or not you’d want to live in the nation you’ve created; if you were born tomorrow into the lower classes, would you be quite so sure that America is the land of opportunity? (See
what I did there? That’s
philosophy
.
I am trying to speak in your language here, rich people. Because I care deeply about how your day is going today.)

Do I think rich people are highly hypocritical in this area. Um, yeah. Shall I delineate further?

• If you’re the makers,
  what do you make
  ?
  I make food and fill boxes and exchange goods for money. Please find a different word, rich people, besides
  makers
  . Maybe you could try “magicians,” because you can create money where there was none before. And then please teach me how to do that too.
  
• I know it’s a pipe dream, but maybe you guys can just admit that we all get shit (see entitlements, roads, tax credits, crop subsidies, fire departments) from the government and move on with your lives?
  
• It’s relatively easy to keep a neighborhood looking nice if the local government actually maintains the roads and medians and signs. If they are too busy making sure that the already-nice sections of town stay that way, they do not have time to come improve the not-nice parts. This is why we laugh when you wonder why we live in run-down areas. It’s because when public service cuts happen, they never happen in the bougie neighborhoods. You should know that, given that it’s being reported in all your media outlets.
  
• Your dogs do not belong in restaurants even if they are supercute. I swear to God, the number of tiny dogs I’ve seen in inappropriate places is at least ten times higher than the number of times I’ve gotten laid in my life. And, newsflash: Only service animals are allowed in restaurants. That’s actually a public health concern. I don’t get why you’re allowed to decide you’re completely above the law simply because you found a purse to fit your dog into.
  

So, okay, sometimes I have a shitty attitude. I’ll give you that. But at least I’m not often entitled. People in the upper classes are so used to having everything done for them that they get sort of irrational and start to feel like you’re personally attacking them for not being honestly pleased to see them. It’s a bit off-putting, to say the least, to have someone sweep in like that.

• If you think poor people are entitled, try denying a rich person with an attitude some service they think they’ve earned. It’s like grief—there are phases. Anger and denial are first. Then comes “do you understand how fucked you are if I don’t get the thing I want?” Followed by “I demand to see your manager”
  and “I’ve never been treated so poorly in my life.” The final stage is bargaining, where they try to give you extra money because all of life is like valet service to them, and an extra five bucks can change the world.
  
• If that doesn’t convince you, try wearing stained or unintentionally torn (professionally torn is fine and thus useless for these purposes) clothes and sitting on a stoop somewhere. Note how many rude comments or nasty glares you get from well-dressed people. Being rich is like being white, you guys. It’s not that sometimes your life doesn’t suck even if you’re white. It’s that you’re not allowed to complain about the two times being white is unhandy, because all of your alternatives are much unhandier. Your other options are any race or ethnicity but white, all of whom face normal human shitty existence
  and
  racism of the entrenched or overt variety. It’s the same thing being rich. I’m not saying that sometimes you don’t get the short end of the stick. All I’m saying is that you look ridiculous whining about how you just can’t make ends meet on $200,000 because you have to spend so much money to survive. You come off as petulant and incapable of managing the slightest taste of reality when the raising of the capital gains tax back to what you paid under Clinton is cast as a brimstone-filled apocalypse. Sometimes you just
  have to bite your tongue and keep your mouths shut to avoid looking like assholes.
  
• Barack Obama caused a flap because he told rich people that they weren’t the sole factors in their own success. You are not allowed to do that, because wealthy people are far too precious to face the idea that they didn’t do it all themselves, or spring out of the womb, fully formed, as hotshot entrepreneurs or whatever they want us to see them as. I cannot fathom actually thinking that the entire world must collaborate to hide reality from me, and on top of that hubris, being upset when someone dares to speak a distasteful truth. You guys have got to get tougher than that.
  

I have no idea what a wealthy person’s health care experience is typically like. I’ve never had that. But I do know that some of the things I see more comfortable folks doing look pretty stupid, and I tend to trust the people with the advanced degrees and years of experience when it comes to how things like cars or bodies work. At least I do if what they want me to do is reasonable and attainable. I only ignore the stuff that’s
out of reach. You guys, though—seriously, why even bother going to the doctor at all if you think you know everything?

• I am so sorry, rich people. It has to suck to have enough money to stay healthy, because then you don’t have an excuse for aging. You have to
  maintain
  .
  
• On the other hand, some of the shit you people will pay for blows my mind. Like lotion with actual pearls ground up in it. Actual. Pearls. I stopped at a mall cart to ask about the stuff. It’s obscenely expensive. I think that’s because you’re literally smearing semiprecious materials all over your face.
  
• You seriously need to control yourselves with the surgical anti-aging. You’re starting to look . . . weird. At least we in the lower classes rarely have to live with botched plastic surgery. Very few poor women have someone over-collagenate their lips or paralyze their foreheads. Poverty has its privileges, and one of them is not having to worry about where the line between beauty standard and malpractice lawsuit is.
  
• We use home remedies because they are cheap, not because they are superior to all of Western medicine. If you can afford a real doctor and you prefer an herbalist, you have lost all sense of reason.
  
• You guys pay people actual cash money for the privilege of becoming physically exhausted. Has it occurred to you all that you could probably run, for free, on the streets—that you do not actually need to pay money to a gym for the privilege of running on a treadmill? I said that to a wealthy woman once, and she told me that she preferred to work out in air-conditioning. It is possible that I am fundamentally misunderstanding something here, but I thought that sweating was a
  good
  thing when you’re trying to lose weight?
  
• Concierge doctors. I am totally cool with people having on-call physicians. But I do think it makes you look like assholes to have your own special VIP offices. Doctors do that, you know; they have a regular office and waiting room for regular patients, and a swanky spa setup for the boutique patients.
  It is the same doctor.
  You are not getting the benefit of more expertise, he’s just kissing your ass more in a slightly more refined setting. If you make the (valid) argument that you get more time, as well, I will just say this: Can you please hire special nurses to listen to your worries about this discolored spot you just discovered on your arm? There are already not enough doctors to go around. I promise you, a talented nurse is as good as a doctor in most cases.
  

I am certain that you have stress, rich people. Nobody’s life is perfect. I am equally certain that your stress and my stress are only similar in that they are called the same thing. I take plenty of shit for my habits and vices; what I simply cannot stand by and allow to happen is for you to escape with no notice. I am sorry, guys, but I’m forcing you out of the human closet.

• You know who smokes? Rich people and poor people. You know what that means?
  Rich people smoke too.
  I’m not kidding, I’ve seen them at it. I even loaned my lighter to a couple of them, just so I could touch their hands and verify that they weren’t holograms or something. With as much shit as I’ve taken in my life for having such a nasty, wasteful, stupid habit, I’d assumed that wealthy people would be much too good for something so déclassé. But nope, they’re on the streets getting cancer with the rest of us. I think I’m done hearing about why poor people smoke. I don’t know, why do rich people smoke? I’m willing to bet that our rationales are pretty fucking similar.
  
• You guys look pretty ridiculous talking about our drug and alcohol use while swanky rehab centers are doing a thriving business. It might behoove you to
  just admit that addiction is terrible and can hit anyone; otherwise we’re probably going to have to start pointing out your raging prescription drug abuse problem. And you wouldn’t want that; as it turns out, it’s kind of embarrassing when people accuse you of copious drug use.