Zsu Zsi laughs as I make a panicked, last-minute shuffle to stuff one more item into my travel bag, a book on poetry co-authored by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, a gift from an ex-girlfriend.
I don’t really need the weight but I’ve been feeling poetic, writing lots of poetry, and I’m enjoying “The Poet’s Companion.” So the book’s coming with me.
I had been up late the night before, reading the chapter on “Witnessing.”
It may seem strange to write poetry during dark times, the authors begin, sort of like “fiddling while Rome burns.” But it is “a necessary act, one that allies itself with hope rather than despair.”
This doesn’t mean, of course, that poetry records only the beautiful, or frivolous, but every act, human or otherwise, that touches our lives in some way.
“A poem of witness,” they write, “wants to look at the realities and name them, to retrieve them from the silence.” That’s what I want to do, name things, the beautiful and the absurd, the run-of-the-mill and familiar, the forgotten and the oppressed, and retrieve them from the silence, from the marginal, where an increasing number of Americans now live.
The media don’t often do an adequate job of telling the stories of those who live on the margins—the unemployed, low-wage factory and warehouse workers, the millions who have recently lost their homes, the millions more of American children who suffer from hunger. By most accounts, they’re just numbers.
To really witness such things, to retrieve them from the silence and name them, to make a poem or story out of what’s actually there, takes courage. I’m learning that the act of making of poem, any kind of poem, is not for the faint of heart.
Just the other day, while listening to a friend warn of an impending irreparable breakdown of our economy and government, and of a coming revolution in the U.S., I started to feel a panic until this came to me:
Strengthen your coreNot great or even good American poetry, but it has helped me to feel less fearful of alarming developments in the global economy, the ever-increasing gap and the injustices that follow between rich and poor, the destruction heaped upon ordinary people by a corrupt banking system and hostile government, as witnessed by the thousands of protestors who have occupied their cities and communities across the U.S.; it has helped me to focus more on staying healthy, being strong, observant and ready to act. This “poem” bears witness to what feels to me like a perilous time.
listen, watch
and be ready.
Zsu Zsi has come as a favor at 6 a.m. to take me to the Amtrak station for the first train out of San Luis Obispo, which runs every day to San Diego. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m going to spend a week with my mother and daughter, a welcome respite from my chores at the farm, and a holiday gift that I’m already treasuring, quality time with the two women I love most.
“I know, it’s ridiculous,” I explain to Zsu Zsi, tightening the pull string on my bag. “I try to travel lighter each time I get on the train,” I say, hoisting the pack over my shoulder, “but my bag always ends up being heavier than I want.”
“Why don’t you get a Kindle?” she asks. “You can put a whole library of books on a Kindle, and it’s light.”
“I will as soon as I can afford one.”
They’re only $80, I’ve been told, which isn’t much but it’s more than I want to spend. I wonder, given my lack of disposable income these last three years, where every dime is like a dollar, how anyone can afford one.
Still, I’d love to travel more lightly, and when I can afford to buy a Kindle, I will.
Were I homeless, which seems as great a possibility now as finding a low-paying slum job, I’d be pushing a shopping cart with all of my belongings spilling over the top, extra shoes and clothing hanging in heavy soiled clumps off the sides, and a box or two full of books on the bottom rack.
I need my creature comforts, which remain adequate at the moment, but I wonder: How much longer will they last? As the gears of the U.S. economy turn clunkier, chewing up the carcasses of minimum wage workers, I’m learning to live with less. I’m traveling lighter.
Like many of my friends, I find myself downsizing, scaling back on unnecessary expenses, growing more of my own food, learning to do my own repairs, thinking about harvesting rainwater and solar energy, building up the local community, preparing for the possibility of a complete breakdown of the system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich.
I’ve been on the tightest budget of my life since the economic meltdown of 2008—where banks made off with billions of taxpayer dollars while taxpayers were left to fend for themselves during a period of record home loan defaults. Money’s tight, people have been saying. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon.
Zsu Zsi and her husband, along with other friends, have kept me from falling through the cracks, providing places to work, rest and eat.
It’s not much easier for them either, I’ve noticed, as friends and family watch their income and savings and retirement dwindle with each passing day. They’re working harder, and longer hours too.
Oil companies, meanwhile, report record profits; and banks, rescued from the brink of disaster, appear to have bounced back, returning much of the capital they borrowed from taxpayers. In some quarters, at least, the system seems to be up and running again. News reports paint a rosier picture of the economy as we head into the New Year. Jobs are increasing, unemployment is down.
The reports, however, come off as false assurances based on projections made from dreams not reality.
The decline in numbers of unemployed doesn’t include the millions of job seekers who no longer qualify for unemployment benefits. The increase in the numbers of jobs is likely the holiday uptick of part-time and seasonal wage slaves. Some economy.
The situation as I view it from our increasingly upscale little beach town on California’s Central Coast, where truly the rich get richer and several of my less privileged neighbors have lost their homes, still appears to be dim.
Job prospects also appear unpromising for many people, unless they’re willing to pour coffee or sling burgers, not that there’s anything wrong with service jobs but not everyone aspires to putting on a Wal-Mart uniform or pushing boxes in million-square-foot warehouses full of cheap goods imported from China.
We’re a warehouse, service economy. Those are the jobs that have most likely increased and which will continue to increase unless we can find ways to rein in our consumer demands, and get more imaginative and creative with our resources.
A little after 6 a.m., Zsu Zsi’s truck winds south along Highway 1 between black open fields under the pitch-dark winter sky. We rumble along comfortably in the late December chill. I feel safe, secure and warm inside the roomy cab.
It’s a big truck that uses a lot of fuel but is necessary for the daily tasks of running a ranch with chickens, and tending a field of blueberries. As oil becomes more costly, however, I wonder, how will she and other farmers and ranchers power their tractors and maintain their fields? How will we get food to market without it becoming too costly for most consumers?
I see a crisis coming, not just for commuters fed up with the high cost of gasoline but for the whole fossil fuel-driven system that brings food to most households throughout the U.S. Mere threats from Iran to choke the supply of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz last week sent a shiver of predictions of $150 per barrel, a spike that most consumers can ill afford.
Just ask any farmer what he spends on fuel and he’ll probably tell you he’s not sure how much longer he can make it. Subsidies help with many farm expenses, but those appear to be drying up soon.
Zsu Zsi’s big Ford is a much better ride than my beat-up but handy 25-year-old Toyota farm truck that leaks when it rains.
As we cruise down the road, lights glow eerily through the darkness from the National Guard’s Camp San Luis Obispo, a site for high-security operations, followed by the sheriff’s facilities and county jail next door, and finally, just across the highway, the state prison, the California Mens Colony, where Tex Watson, handsome assistant to the murderous Charles Manson, once resided. This whole area of the highway gives off an eery institutional glow in the darkness.
It reminds me of a fictionalized account I read once of a future San Luis Obispo County, which served as the government’s staging area for attacks on citizens, a top secret training site and encampment for a nation built on incarceration and fueled by terror.
When I first encountered the idea, it seemed strange, both plausible and a little fanciful at the same time, but now it’s become a quite possible reality with President Obama’s support of recent legislation that allows the military to indefinitely detain any American citizen it considers a threat to national security. The system for mass incarceration (yes, this was just supposed to be a whacky conspiracy theory) is already on its way to being intact with at least 20 newly built detention centers across the U.S. (see PBS Frontline’s “Lost in Detention”).
The president promised to protect citizens from the legislation’s potential for abuse, but never explained why, with such reservations, he went ahead and signed it any way.
I’m guessing that it will make a convenient excuse to detain Occupy protestors in the next wave of occupations that are likely to take place in huge numbers coming this spring.
In three years, the Obama administration has already detained and deported more illegal immigrants, processed and warehoused in newly built detention centers across the nation than the Bush administration could accomplish in its two full terms of office.
Further up, another cluster of lights present themselves from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where 20,000 of some of the country’s brightest minds and most privileged students pursue technical studies in agriculture, architecture and engineering, all supported through huge corporate injections of funding.
This little corridor of government operations in defense, education and imprisonment provides a pretty good living for a lot of people in this mostly rural county, rich in agriculture and tourism.These are the best-paying jobs.
Austerity budgets at all levels of government, however, have begun to take a bite of out those jobs too. We’re learning of high-paid civil servants who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing little more than push paper.
People are pissed off about that and, with the help of actual and threatening federal, state, and municipal bankruptcies, priorities are shifting, and money’s not available for new hires or much else.
Beyond government-funded industry, there’s not much in the way of high-paying jobs here. Most people get by, sometimes holding down two or three jobs, working in restaurants, contracting services for building and repair, and running mom and pop shops, candy and antique stores, coffee joints and gyms. And, of course, there’s farm labor.
As we cruise along, the darkness to the east begins to turn cobalt above the institutional lighting. I’ve been telling Zsu Zsi my woes of living on the financial razor’s edge, suggesting that I may have to move to another area, yet no matter where I look, things appear bleak.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” I say, thinking of a recent story I’d read about debtors being threatened with jail. I have unpaid debts but none as great as those owed by the government. You don’t see many government officials going to jail for their debts. Yet, to listen to some politicians, you’d think only lowlifes don’t pay their bills.
“Well, at least you have a place to go, if things don’t work out,” Zsu Zsi says as we descend the hill that divides the state prison from San Luis Obispo. “You can go to live with your mother.”
As much as I love my mother, that’s the last thing I want to do, but in this economy, it may be the most practical, at least, for staying off the street.
As we approach the sleepy college town and the Amtrak station, Zsu Zsi, a native of Hungary who helped bring an end to that country’s Soviet occupation in 1991, puts poverty and homelessness into perspective in her accented voice.
“I asked a homeless woman, how can she live on the street with no place to go? No place to be safe, no place to just let go and share a meal with friends or family? You have no one when you’re homeless. It’s so wrong.”
I try to imagine what it would be like to miss spending a week with my mother and daughter because of homelessness. It makes me shudder.
It’s Christmas time, Xmas time, the holidays in America, when friends and families gather and reconnect, and all I can think of is that it’s been hardly a week since the Associated Press reported that one out of two Americans lives in poverty, the highest rate ever.
“We’re fast becoming a third-world nation,” I say to Zsu Zsi. “Half the country lives in poverty.”
“That’s what happens when you cut education,” she snaps. “When you have a country run by a bunch of dumb shits, what can you expect? Poverty!”
Yes, I think, it’s hard to advance as a culture when one of your national goals is to make people dumber. The one advantage to dumbing people down, though, is that they’re easier to manipulate, easier to turn into stooges and henchmen.
Zsu Zsi’s own homeland struggles under a resurgent neofascist movement that seeks more seats in Hungary’s parliament, where they hope to restore the glory days of right-wing violence, racism and bigotry, all outgrowths of poverty and ignorance, and lack of education.
“It’s scary,” she says. “There are places you don’t go in Budapest, if you are Jewish.”
“Are you serious?” Already I feel naive for having asked, yet I can’t help adding, “After what Europe has already been through?”
“I’m dead serious,” she says.
The revolutions for freedom from oppression that have erupted around the globe and continue to spread will meet their fierce resisters; they always do.
It’s no different here in the U.S., where once it was possible for right and left to agree, as conservative stuffed shirt William F. Buckley and Black Panther Huey Newton once agreed, that the success of any revolution will be measured by the degree of its humanity.
The shape of our government is anything but humane; it supplies the world with its most sophisticated and deadly weapons, kills innocent people, barters in violence and mayhem, and uses torture to terrorize its enemies and its citizens.
The revolution that I envision will be a turn away from the inhumane, will be the joining of citizens who seek to rebuild their communities as they see fit, without fear, without corporate influence and government interference, and with the courage to create a world free from violence and terror, a world built on just and humane principals.
Some are saying that we will have to fight for it, maybe even take up arms to defend ourselves against increasing government encroachments upon our rights as a free people. That may be the case but it’s more likely that revolution, if there is one, will occur through the resurgence of strong local communities lessening their dependencies on outside resources and agencies, with homes designed to create rather than consume energy, and people learning to travel more lightly, write more poetry, and name more realities and retrieve them from the silence. §
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