Stunning, how inept...

... I can be

Before I elaborate on that statement in, hopefully, efficient detail, I want to note that my previous three blog entries (variations on "In the time that we have left..."), may not have been a good idea. Or, at least, advanced an idea that needed extensive elaboration, which I was not at all prepared to develop. Another time, perhaps.

Moving on, then.

This is a story about how inept I can be. It begins around 8:03 some recent morning when Brendan, who was probably already out uberring, texted me. "Hey, did you ever happen to get a new city sticker for my car?"

I read his text about an hour later. Reading sent my stomach to roiling. In my Chicago experience, going on 15 years this century, renewing the city stickers on our cars is a reliably fraught undertaking.

After writing most of the 130 or so words immediately preceding, I took my first writing break. I know. I write all of 130 words and I am so exhausted I need a break? Yeah, well, diligence is not one of my major qualities. Regardless, after I took that break, I wrote the paragraphs indented below:

I need to run out to the porch to check the temperature on the grill because I am trying to slowly smoke a slab of back ribs. And, having performed that check, I extend my break to take a shot of tequila. A reward I promised myself if I so much as began this post about my day in pursuit of a renewed city sticker for our Honda Accord. The one that Brendan takes uberring.

Tequila shots are not, of course, my usual practice. I drink beer moderately and rarely touch hard liquor. But that day was special. It was 40 degrees out and I was trying to smoke a slab of ribs on my grill. Lots of people can do that, although the cold day will increase the challenge of maintaining the grill temperature in the range of 180 to 200 degrees. 

And it was also the day that I had the set of experiences that led me to decide to write a story about how inept I can be, an ineptness that had me rueing bad decisions and incompetence. Hence, in the moment, I soothed myself with a shot of tequila.

Break over, I returned to the writing task. The tequila shot was a big one in more ways than one. 

Oversize shot glass. A Mark Twain souvenir from Hannibal, Missouri. 'Never refuse to take a drink--under any circumstances," it says, quoting Twain. 

That's not my style. But right now, I wish it was. Not because my especially inept performance earlier that day made me wish I was drunk. After all, that experience of myself as less than competent is in no way unusual and, at this point in my life, it's not very distressing. Overtime, one tends to get over harsh feelings about oneself. But from time to time I do wonder if I might have tapped a little bit more genius if I had gotten to the bottom of more bottles in this life.

After absorbing Brendan's text and moving on from the sinking feeling, I dialed the city information line. A polite and helpful phone operator answered almost immediately, giving me a number for the city clerk's office where, the helpful phone operator assured me, still another helpful city staffer would certainly tell me how to go about replacing the city sticker that I apparently had previously purchased, and then lost, in some unremembered fashion, and was never gonna find.

Thirty-one minutes later, I finally came off hold to engage a voice. Thirty-one. Minutes. Later. WTF, you're probably saying to yourself, you stayed on hold for 31 minutes? Couldn't you think of a better way to go about doing what you needed to do?'

Well, no. I just let the time slip away. Though while on hold I did get through two pages of comics in the morning newspaper. Some number of other people (many? most? all?) wouldn't consider that a very productive use of my time, but I am generally not inclined to think about my time in such terms.

Anyhow... "I bought a new city sticker for my car about two months ago, but my son just told me that we still have the 2022 sticker on the windshield. I assume we lost the last one, so I need to know how to get a replacement."

"Oh," the helpful voice responded, "I'm going to give you the number of the office that can answer that question for you."

"Oy," I kvetched, "you can't tell me how to do it?" I almost added that I'd been on hold for thirty-one minutes, then refrained from saying so. Because, really, nobody who takes the calls of people who have been living on long holds is likely to be motivated by a desire to provide whatever it is that might be needed by the person coming off hold, especially if they had been holding on the wrong line.

"Sorry," she responded, "this number is for fines and late fees."

"Okay, I get it. Can you give me that number, again?"

And she did. And I called the number and talked to a woman who told me that I just needed to come downtown to city hall, go to the police desk near the entry, get a "miscellaneous police report" from them, take it to the clerk's office on the first floor, and pay $5 to replace the missing city sticker.

I was good with that. I could take the Green Line from the 31st Street/IIT station near my house and get downtown in, oh, say, 30 minutes or thereabouts. And, before I could even consider riding my bike to the clerk's office (which, as it turned out, would have been a much smarter decision), I realized that I could read on the train. This is generally a good thing because I tend to not put aside time to read at home.

Brendan had offered to stop uberring for a bit and give me a ride downtown. But I'm thinking that he needs the money he's working to earn--he's in law school and near-broke most of the time--and I make a habit of walking or taking public trans whenever I can, even when it comes at a significant cost in time.

I should add that much of my adult life has been shaped by another "behavioral inefficiency," the guilty wish to be the direct cause of as few environmental-havocing, fossil-fuel-consuming, climate-changing, class-gender-and-race-privileged deeds, woke or otherwise, as I can manage. (This statement should also be the departure point for a future post about the privilege I was born with, and have never been able to outrun, despite struggling often, but perhaps half-heartedly, to reject. Privilege is, after all, the collective advantage of the caste into which one is born. Individuals can steer neurotically, or any other way they might wish, into calamity, and even sever themselves violently from their caste, but the privilege that is the property of the group, is not diminished. Until the revolution, maybe.)

By the way, Helen Oyeyemi is a pretty wonderful writer. I've been a writer, on and off, for the last 60 years, probably three times longer than Oyeyemi has been writing, but I can't touch what she can do. Why is my writing no match for Oyeyemi's. Not imaginative enough? Far less dedicated to the craft? Less disciplined in the effort? Who knows? But it's safe to say that if we were playing basketball, Oyeyemi would be dunking on me at will.

So, that's a good thing that happened that day. I read probably 40 pages in The Icarus Girl, in which Oyeyemi tells the story of Jess, the daughter of a Nigerian woman and a white Brit, an accountant, no less. Jess is a quirky, but loved child who visits her ancestral homeland and befriends a ghostly inhabitant of her grandfather's family compound.

Oyeyemi's control of her work creates numerous chances for her to digress in the service of enriching the story. She quotes Samuel Coleridge, making one of his poem's importance to Jess a way of deepening Oyeyemi's characterization of her 14-year-old character. "And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle around him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise."

It is a bit of forewarning that Jess fails to process. I can confidently say that if I had somehow made myself read that Coleridge poem, I would have encountered those lines without any sense of what they might mean, or how they might make me feel. But reading those lines in the context of Jess's journey, I felt schooled. And moved. And, so, maybe it was a good idea to take the train.

But, no. The train and the book would turn out to be among the many ways I would waste time on the day that began with that morning text from my youngest child, whom I like to call Brendo. Or Mr. Potato Head. The child that Nate and Julie, his much older siblings, like to call Jumpin' (different story, another time).

At the police desk at city hall, I asked one of the officers for a "miscellaneous police report," as I believed I had been directed to do by the last voice I had heard. "No, you have to go to the clerk's office to get the form," the officer said. "Then bring it here and we fill it out. Go to room 107 around the corner and ask them for the form."

Okay. Room 107. Waiting my turn, I stand in line. For an extended period of time that I could only endure and knew, for a fact, that I would not be able to even estimate how m much time would pass, let alone measure with precision.

But finally, I stood in front of a real live person at one of the long line of teller's windows in the clerk's office. Vehicle-registration-and-neighborhood-parking-permit Department. Or Division. Who ever really knows the precise names of these offices, departments, divisions?

"I need the form for the miscellaneous police report," I said to the person before me.

"Oh," she side-eyes me. "You get that from the police desk in main lobby."

Oy.

"Really. They told me that I get it from you and bring it to them."

Nope.

I went back to the lobby. The police officer whom I had first encountered, a sergeant, no less, smiled a greeting. "Didja get it," he asked.

Nope. "They said I'm supposed to get it from you."

The sergeant was incredulous. "C'mon, I'll go back there with you."

So, we walked back to room 107 together. A polite guy, the sergeant signaled to the teller to whom I had spoken earlier, that he would wait to speak to her until she was done with the person she was currently serving. But, feeling that I had long since wasted all the time that any ordinary standard of public service would require me to waste, I spoke up without waiting my turn. A demonstration of class privilege, perhaps?

In the upshot, my impatience, my attempt to make the teller do what I needed her to do, had no effect. "I'll be with you in a moment," she said.

When it was finally our turn, the sergeant spoke, then the teller spoke, then the sergeant spoke, and on and on. I didn't fully understand what they were saying to each other, but it became clear that I had asked the teller for the wrong form and the fault was mine. In any case, she was prepared to give me the correct form, the one that I would take to the police desk in the lobby, hand over to the police and receive, in return, the miscellaneous police report that I would take back to her and hand over, along with a five dollar fee, and receive, in return, a replacement city sticker for our Honda.

"I just need to see your driver's license," she said.

But I could not show her my driver's license, because it was at home, sitting on our copier, where I had left it after having scanned it for the purpose of sharing it with a different city office in an attempt to get a city permit for an entirely different purpose.

"Funny story," I said. "I don't have it. It's at home on my copier."

"Well, I need to see some sort of state ID."

Oy. I sorted through a number of other comments I might make in that moment, but none of them seemed at all relevant to the problem created by the fact that I couldn't produce my driver's license.

I left room 107. On the way out of the building, I stopped by the police desk ion the lobby. The very cheerful sergeant, apparently eager to fill out a temporary police report on my behalf, smiled at me.

"Guess what," I said to him. "I couldn't get the form. I left my driver's license at home."

Determined to help, he suggested that I go to the Secretary of State's office across the street and ask them to issue a replacement driver's license. This did not strike me as a good idea, at the time. But on the way back to the Green Line, I stopped in the lobby of the state office where a number of people were in lines that snaked around corners and ended somewhere out of sight.

I decided that I would go home and get my driver's license off the copier and try again the next day.

Poverty, by America

A great book with a great message

around which we should mobilize

In the park with Jetta a couple days ago, thinking about all sorts of people and things. About how I drifted home from the airport after dropping Marrianne off to catch a flight to Pittsburgh.

 

The rush hour traffic was jammed up on the Stevenson from Cicero Avenue pretty much all the way to the Dan Ryan. Drivers frantically changing lanes, sometimes changing back instantly, looking for ways to shave minutes off their commutes to work. Meanwhile, I was, like I said, drifting; sliding carefully over to the left lane knowing that the right-side exit ramps to the Ryan northbound and south were the targets of probably 90 percent of the drivers around me.

 

At 75, I’m enjoying a level of health that my Bronzeville neighbors, 10 and 20 years younger than me, don’t share. The privilege that drives my longer life expectancy and relative comfort is rooted in my whiteness, my gender, my sexual orientation, and my class background. Retired these past many years, I still have the energy to stay fit, to take care of my home, to travel and to, sometimes, write.

 

I am privileged to have walked thousands of miles with Jetta. To have thought about so many different things on those walks. To have admired beauty. To have perceived great stories written in grit and rooted in the sometimes-blighted city in which we live, to have witnessed so many Chicago stories full of heroes, both visible and, more often, unsung; the heroes, the ordinary folks, who have labored to create a city that always rises above the worst that it could be and do, and sometimes shines with rare beauty.

 

For the immediate future, though, a piece of every day is and will be about how I must urge tired, chronically alarmed, old Jetta to wander wherever in the park she might want to go after I let her off the leash. “You don’t have a lot of time left in this life, Jetta,” I tell her. “Enjoy this beautiful day.”

 

I think also of my friend Richard and the time some years back, that Richard set aside an afternoon for a community of friends to stop by to say goodbye to Ginger, a noble-looking, golden-haired German shepherd, about to be put to sleep before she was 8 years old. I think about Richard himself, a big, dignified, Black man, who nevertheless was also a chronic complainer, constantly annoyed by both trivial and significant matters, Richard who gave of himself always to take care of his frail mom and his disabled brother, and was my best DC friend, a gay man who flamed exuberantly on Facebook, and who passed away before he was 60.

 

And here I am, 75 and healthy, privileged to take leisure whenever I spy the opportunity. Privileged to own the right clothes for any season and to live in a nice, big house with a brilliant, diligent, loving woman and to have children who have forgiven me for my failings more than I deserve.

And there is also, in my life, Isabel, a granddaughter who spreads cheer.

 

I have had what feels like years of running and jumping and hooping. I have acquired the language and perspective to express gratitude, and to recognize that my privilege is rooted in the price that others with less privilege have been forced to pay. Privilege that allowed a big, white, straight, middle-class guy to dodge the worst consequences of stupid risks that ended badly, the same or similar mistakes for which others almost certainly paid a higher price.

 

But, now comes a book, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty by America, that makes it clear that the cost of the wealth and power that some of us enjoy in a lifetime is paid by others who suffer, repeatedly, the injuries of class and race and other systemic hatreds, the outrageous cost of being poor in America. Desmond makes it clear from the start that his book is not about the lives of the poor, not about the “what” of poverty, but is about the “why.”

 

There have been plenty of good books, great ones, Desmond writes, about poverty and the poor. The list of reliable and noteworthy accounts of what the poor live with every day is long, stretching back to the 19^thcentury, Desmond notes, specifically citing books by Jacob Riis, Jane Adams, James Agee and Walker Evans, and the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange. Desmond ends the list with Michael Harrington’s The Other America, which, along with the impetus created by the Civil Rights movement, directly inspired Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”

 

These are “books [that] help us understand the nature of poverty. They are vital. But they do not—and in fact cannot—answer the most fundamental question, which is: Why? Why all this American poverty? I’ve learned that this question requires a different approach. To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this needless suffering? This book is my attempt to answer that question, addressed to that ‘we.’ Which makes this a book about poverty that is not just about the poor. Instead, it’s a book about how the other other half lives, about how some lives are made small so that others may grow.” 

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 7-8)

 

On pages 176 and 177, Desmond quotes James Baldwin as part of his effort to explain why the United States, which celebrates itself for its great wealth, would tolerate endemic poverty. The quote nowhere near captures the range and subtlety of Desmond’s explanation, but it’s a foundational piece in the structure of his argument.

 

“’Any real change,’ writes James Baldwin, ‘implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed.”

 

At the time, Baldwin was pointing to pending desegregation as the threat on the horizon for (mostly) white folks that warned of a coming dispossession that would strip white people of their most celebrated entitlement, their supremacy, which might be the last of many privileges to go, but would, they feared, crumble and collapse, swept away by a tide of enemies, hated and feared, people not like them.

 

But Baldwin, were he here today, might well be writing the same thing to assess MAGA, which developed out of the renewed threat white folks always knew was coming, had known for years, out of a past that was literally perceived by white folks as a black hole, and manifested itself finally just as Trump was preaching nativism and nostalgia for the edenic past, as Black. Lives. Matter.

 

I’m not saying that the various narcissistic and psychopathic demagogues, like Trump (who arise always to amplify and soothe those fears), require anything from the rest of us—no sympathy, no understanding, and certainly no forgiveness. But I am saying that we must understand what terrors infest the minds and hearts of those they incite.

 

We must understand those fears because the changes that must happen to eliminate the inequities and injustices that plague our society will take a bigger movement than any that have tackled the problem before. In his epilogue, Desmond describes a few movements that made a difference in the past.

 

“Behind every great blow dealt to the scourge of poverty, there have been ordinary Americans who have bound themselves to one another to accomplish extraordinary things. Social movements spark ideas, providing the blueprint for reform, as when the unemployed workers’ movement of the late nineteenth century called for a public works program decades before the New Deal,” he writes.

 

“Most important, movements apply the heat. The American labor movement was the dominant force behind the New Deal. The tenants’ union that rose up during the Depression provoked Congress to establish our public housing system. How was President Johnson able to break through congressional gridlock to deliver the civil rights acts, the Great Society and the War on Poverty? The civil rights movement forced his hand by putting unrelenting pressure on lawmakers. Johnson admitted as much in 1965, telling Congress that the actions of Black Americans who had joined the civil rights movement ‘called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress had it not been for [their] persistent bravery, and [their] faith in American democracy?’”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 183-184)

 

And, we must understand the fears of our fellow citizens who have been and are incited to hate and dread the progress that others make because the movement that must be built if we are ever to end poverty, by America, must necessarily be the largest in the history of this country and cannot be confined only to those who already believe that the arc of history bends toward justice. Without those who are afraid and wish to barricade themselves away from the future, we cannot build a movement big enough to force the change that we wish to see.

 

Because, if poverty in America, and all the social consequences that arise from poverty, is ever to end, it will be because Americans who have benefitted from the inequity that is an integral part of our society, will also have come to understand that what they must give up on the way to a country that is both equitable and just will be much less than what they gain.

 

“When your power comes from people,” Desmond writes. “you need a lot of them. The movement must grow, which means we can’t afford to write anyone off. As Alicia Garza, co-creator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, has put it, ‘To build the kind of movement that we need to get the things that we deserve, we can’t be afraid to establish a base that is larger than the people we feel comfortable with.’ That is, ‘We have to reach beyond the choir.’”

 

Indeed, it is likely that a significant percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump, and even the true believers who think that the 2020 election was stolen, follow Trump because his relentless fury at “outsiders,” at those who want their fair share of the wealth of this richest of all countries will get that share at the expense of those who live a precarious middle-class life, a life that they insist that they “earned.” Their stability and their luxurious, earned or otherwise, precarious or not, the goal of the demagogue is to stoke fear and hatred among them because when the demagogue succeeds at that work they are rewarded while the people who revere them find themselves alienated from their neighbors, and blind to genuinely common interests.

 

Desmond shares a story about activists trying to get signatures supporting a higher minimum wage at a mall in western Michigan, Maga country. “I really thought we were going to be punched or something was going to happen,” Sara Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, told Desmond.

 

“[Jayaraman] and her team stood out,” Desmond writes. “They were all women of color, including two wearing hijabs, in a place where nearly all the shoppers were white. ‘But we’d walk up to them and say. ‘Do you want to sign a petition for 15 [dollars an hour]?’ Ninety-nine percent of people said, ‘I already signed it,’ or ‘Where can I sign?’ It reminded Sara of what happened almost two years before, in November 2020. One Fair Wage were gathered outside the statehouse in Albany, New York, to call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for tipped workers. The crowd of mostly Black and Hispanic New Yorkers had bought with them a twenty-four-foot-high statue of a flexing and aproned Black woman nicknamed Elena the Essential worker. As the workers were chanting and cheering on speakers, a group of white men and women in red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats approached. Unbeknownst to One Fair Wage, the day of their rally was also the day the state legislature had scheduled to certify the results of the presidential election, and MAGA protesters had gathered earlier to challenge the count. When the pro-Trump protesters learned that the workers were there to push for higher wages, they shook hands and joined their protest.”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 187-188)

 

So, there it is. It’s not about the demagogues. It’s about the people who feel that they don’t have all that they need and are in danger of losing what they have. They should be the building blocks of an historic movement, one that works in their interests and ours. People need to know that their privilege, however limited it might be, is an obstacle in the way of our collective challenge to bend the moral arc. They need to know that giving up privilege opens a doorway to a better world.