What We Owe to Each Other
On poverty, the cruel illusion of "worthiness," and other economic heresy
When I look at this panorama of aspen trees, I’m transported back to the idyllic October afternoon in 2014 when I took this photo. It was a cloudless, temperate, flawless day. After a couple of financially-precarious years at the beginning of our marriage, my husband and I were in a comparatively more comfortable position. We had enough to travel to the Rocky Mountains, where we stayed with a friend in her cabin with her enormous-but-chill pit bull, Roscoe.
During our stay, our daily drives through the serpentine roads of the Rockies brought me to tears as the magnitude of their pristine beauty overwhelmed me. But this day brought with it a particular magic.
For me, the day began before dawn, which in itself was a departure from my norm at home, where I often don’t wake up before 9 am. But my husband’s and my minds were abuzz with ideas for a business we were trying to launch—our journey to Colorado, in fact, was to meet with a potential investor.
As I photographed this sunrise (sorry, 2014 iPhone lens! You were a champ), I noticed how there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky—odd for the Rockies. Alert to this from daybreak on, I looked for clouds all day; none ever appeared. It felt portentous, that maybe our idea would succeed. That we would get investors, and move to Colorado, and bring my ailing parents with us.
Sadly, it didn’t pan out. Despite our best efforts, that was not the path life had in store for us. But this week-long sojourn rejuvenated us nevertheless, and in the darker moments I’ve had in the years since, remembering the tranquility of this particular day has helped center me when little else would.
None of it would have happened, though, if the twists of fate had been a bit crueler than they were for us in early 2013.
In 2013, my husband and I were newly wed. I was digging deep to overcome the unexplained chronic fatigue and pain that taken hold of me in late 2012, because I was in my final semester of college and determined to earn my bachelor’s degree. It was clear by that point that my initial plan to go to law school after my BA would not happen—one Ls don’t get the luxury of taking one course a semester, and a full load of undergrad courses was barely doable. I’d gone from making the dean’s list every semester to metaphorically limping across the finish line, but dropping out 6 credits away was not something my psyche could take.
A serious financial setback shortly before spring break, though, nearly broke me. A windfall we needed to get caught up on rent was not, in fact, on its way; we were at risk of eviction. My parents didn’t have room for us, and my mother-in-law still struggles to accept that her son married a woman who is LGBT and not Christian and has a child who is non-binary; back then, she made clear that we were mostly on our own.
Although I did not bring harm to myself or anyone else, I knew I was in dire straits mentally. I did not see any way through this without losing our apartment and becoming homeless, and I feared where that line of thinking might lead me. So, thanks to my student health insurance and the wisdom of the social worker at the local clinic, I checked into a mental health facility for 72 hours.
The story of those 72 hours is a traumatic tale best left for another time and perhaps a bit more therapy, but I am nevertheless grateful that I chose to go there instead of the alternatives that were churning in my mind before. We were able to pay our rent; soon thereafter, my husband got a part-time job that would eventually become full-time. The hospital stay did help bolster me enough to make it through my remaining classes, and after writing my thesis on media literacy, in May of 2013 I got my bachelor’s in history.
I don’t let myself think too often of the events of February and March of 2013. The sheer terror I felt is both distant and all too raw.
But as the COVID pandemic rages on and monkeypox asks COVID to “hold my beer,” as rents increase to obscene levels and then keep going up from there, as mere survival becomes a luxury, more and more people will experience that terror of losing everything, or at least with the threat of it looming overhead like a sword of Damocles.
Over the weekend as I scrolled Twitter, my friend Falco SkyWolf tweeted:
Earlier in the day, Falco (who uses he/xey pronouns) wrote an anguished thread about his dire straits. Xey are in a similar spot as me in many ways—immunocompromised and neurodivergent, he cannot work outside the home and risk exposure. Xey finds himself in a precarious position; work as a graphic artist isn’t enough to pay rent on time, and all too often, asking for help feels like screaming into a void.
Falco’s thread conjured an emotional flashback for me, to that late winter in 2013 that threatened to freeze me out of my home instead of bringing on the spring. If you’ve been there, it will be a familiar horror; one that you may put out of your conscious mind most of the time, but it still lurks somewhere, perhaps behind the cellar stairs of your subconscious, ready to grab your ankle when you descend to retrieve some other memory and pull you into its chasm of despair.
Mercifully, mutual aid came to the rescue for Falco, and he was able to get caught up on rent. But the pandemics rage on and the bills keep coming, so feel free to check out his art, links to xeir writing and donation sites, and more on Twitter.
Poverty is indeed disabling. It consumes your thoughts. When a food stamp recipient buys lobster, you do not know what they sacrifice for that. Perhaps it is a meal to celebrate their daughter making honor roll. Maybe it’s their birthday. Maybe it’s their spouse’s anniversary and they’ve been eating ramen for two weeks and will have to eat it for another two weeks just to offset the cost of this one lobster dinner. But the romance of that evening, the brief escape to feel pampered and fed, the shared laughter and cuddles, will feed their spirits more than some beans and rice and canned tomatoes ever could.
If you’re at the grocery store, mind what’s in your own cart, not what’s in anyone else’s.
Comedian Hannah Gadsby’s 2020 special Douglas is a witty look into her diagnosis of autism in 2016 after a lifetime of utter confusion. For those without Netflix, this 2020 NPR interview with Gadsby is also enlightening and speaks to my experience with diagnosed ADHD and suspected autism.
But one line Ms Gadsby said in Douglas often comes to mind, both as I help my mother navigate through her end-of-life experience and as I write. It pertains to a common autistic trait: telling people things that are obvious to us, but they appear not to know. She said, "I have a piece of information you seem to be missing. You may or may not be ready to hear this information, but I'll tell you anyway because knowledge is power, ignorance is a cage, and feelings can be dealt with. I bid you good day." Historically, this trait got me in trouble. If you speak bluntly to the wrong people, you can trigger some negative, even violent reactions. People with autism are far more likely to suffer abuse at the hands of caregivers, strangers, and police; this risk only increases if the autistic person is Black, BIPOC, or LGBTQ+.
As I’ve learned “the rules” that I often say I feel neurotypical people got in some form—book? patch in the brain? osmosis?—but that I had to piece together through trial and error, I’ve gotten a better read on when and where it’s safe to say obvious things bluntly. With my mom, I have to weave a compelling but calming narrative around whatever blunt information I have for her. On one recent phone call, she expressed befuddlement over her depression. “I’m in such a nice place, and we talk all the time, and I should be happy. Why aren’t I?”
Clearly, I had a piece of information she seemed to be missing. Ready or not, my mouth blurted out, “Well, you have Alzheimer’s and you’re dying. Of course you’re depressed.” That jarred her into a lucidity borne of fear, and I realized I needed to sugarcoat a bit, help her deal with her feelings. I did, and that tale will either make it into a future essay or certainly my memoir—which I’ll continue to tease periodically until I’m ready to make a firm announcement. For now, the point is, I say obvious things and leave the recipient to deal with that information as they choose.
Pandemics. Climate catastrophe after catastrophe (yes, that last link indicates that the news is not quite as bad as initially reported, but there is still indeed a dramatic loss of plankton in a significant portion of the Atlantic Ocean). Those two issues alone are challenging and traumatic enough for humanity to go through.
Humanity cannot survive if capitalism and its greed continue to exist.
It becomes increasingly clear with each passing day that we have two choices as a global ecosystem. One choice is to continue to toil and dissociate our way through all these horrors until the billionaires have enough resources to blast off to Mars with a “select few” who will help them colonize a new planet. After all, as they see it, colonization has brought only good throughout human history—dragons do not tend to see the pillaging and earth scorching that led to their hoards of gems as a bad thing. This leaves the rest of us to perish through plague, sectarian violence over resources, and eventual uninhabitability of Earth for the overwhelming majority of those of us currently alive.
Another choice is to realize that right now, we still have enough resources for everyone. If we shift our priorities from profit margins to personal well-being. If we provide for everyone—which we absolutely can. We live on this precious orb because it has everything we need. What threatens it now is avarice.
Whatever your neurotype, we are all living through collective traumas that we have never experienced in human history. As more glaciers fall, as more plagues spread, as more of us have our basic human rights and needs stripped away from us, the absolute last thing anyone needs to worry about is having enough money to survive.
Many philosophers throughout history, from Locke to Rousseau to T.M. Scanlon, have debated the inherent values in our social contracts. Scanlon’s views on contractualism led to his 1998 work, What We Owe to Each Other, which served as a main source of education for Eleanor Shellstrop, Kristen Bell’s character in NBC’s The Good Place.
While I do not deem myself as wise as Locke or Rousseau or Scanlon or Chidi Anagonye, Eleanor’s mentor and soul mate, I do agree that a functioning society owes it to each other to care for everyone’s well-being. A functioning society does not put basic needs behind a paywall and also shame those who cannot afford those needs of their own accord. A functioning society does not starve community coffers and then tell the needy that they can beg for help at a church—which may or may not help depending on whether they deem them worthy of aid. A functioning society does not accept the kind of mass inequality and excess death that we are experiencing now.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing that helps fill the gaps when people experience financial difficulties. It can be transformative. I wholeheartedly recommend giving freely and often as your circumstances allow to any mutual aid requests you find. If you don’t have the financial resources, share these requests with your networks.
What we owe to each other is support. We owe it to each other to understand that we are all worthy of food, shelter, healthcare, education, water, and rest. That it doesn’t matter how the beggar on the corner might spend the money you give them; the point is, they need help and we shouldn’t make value judgments. We owe it to each other to see that our problems are big enough without adding societally-induced stressors like lack of money. We owe it to each other to build a society that finds it abhorrent that anyone would perish due to poverty. Any system that requires some people live in destitution to motivate everyone else to keep working is a broken system.
We owe it to each other to reject the idea that suffering is necessary. Then the healing can begin.