Waiting Room

Image by Derrick Coetzee 

A late summer sun casts a warm autumn light.  Fingers of sunlight are shattered by the delicate branches of a graceful fir tree.  Below the tree, a quiet line waits for the Free Clinic door to open.  I am the last person in this line.  My quiet sigh rises into the light.  I let the filtered sunlight soothe me.    I take a deep breath and relax into the moment.

Right in front of me, a tall man fidgets.  His body crackles with restless energy.  His legs are covered with angry purple-red blotches.  They look like self-inflicted burns.

The door opens.  We quickly file pass the front desk.  A short pink form on a clipboard is thrust into anxious hands.  The electric man in front of me has sores on his knuckles as well.   He is talking to the woman behind the desk.  I tune in to the conversation after all the important things are said.

"I'm sorry, Jason but we can't help you here."

Jason thanks the woman politely and awkwardly lurches out the door.  The static generated by his presence lingers and then is covered by coughing and quiet sighs.

For most of us, it will be a long wait.  Some of us may not be seen.  The clinic can only serve so many.  Those not seen will carry the burden of our ills back into the world.

We live in the "land of the free and the home of the brave" but some days even the Free Clinic isn't free for all.  Yet, all of us must be brave.  It takes courage to crawl out of bed in the morning.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness teases us from a great distance.

A young woman sips the last of her water from a paper cup.  She reaches up and wipes tears from her eyes.  She tries to hide her tears but she can not.  She sniffles quietly and shifts uncomfortably in her chair.  Her pain, her need, is an embarrassment.

I've seen her before, a different face, a different person but the same pain, the same need.  I have been her before wiping unwanted tears from my eyes.  Today, I float above the tears.  I am being brave.

We all wait quietly.  We all struggle inside with the burden of being here.  We struggle to find work.  We struggle to find the money to pay for food, housing, health care.  There is never enough.  We struggle to buy our children clothes and shoes that they will outgrow all too quickly.  We struggle to hold our families together against great odds.  We struggle to keep our dignity and we struggle to summon up the hope to begin another day, to wage another battle against never having enough.

No one understands poverty better than the poor.  Yet, our voice is only a faint whisper.  The powerful can not hear.  Exhausted, ashamed of our struggles, there is little energy left to advocate for ourselves.  We blame ourselves for where we are.  We wonder what happened to the dreams were were promised as children.

"Work hard, and you'll go far."

"Everyone can be a success."

"You can be anything you want to be!"

Some how we've failed the dreams and the dreams have failed us.  Bitterness often hides behind the exhaustion.  Apathy is an armor we wear when we can't take any more.

Slowly, I become aware of the television droning overhead.  In the waiting room, a documentary about the current state of health care plays.  It focuses on the flaws in the current system and about the need for more patient-centered care.   These words are depressing.  We know what is wrong with the system through thousands of personal experiences.   We all tune it out.  It becomes another background noise, like the coughing, the crying, the cooing of a baby.  The facts are already crushing us.  We need words of hope.

People flow in and out almost seamlessly.  All that remains is a little room in which to wait.  Maybe tomorrow will be better than today.    We wait.

Please note:   I am extremely grateful that the Free Clinic of Southwest Washington exists and that I have received excellent care from the people who volunteer their time to help the low-income and uninsured in Clark County.  They are providing an incredibly valuable service to a growing number of its citizens.  They treat the people they see with dignity and compassion.  

Call me a glutton for punishment.

No, I'm not referring to the song, "Both Sides Now".   Sister Ruth had the 8th grade class learn and sing it.   It's not a bad memory.    What I am referring to my desire to learn more about my economic class through reading.  The library contained a book by David K. Shipley called The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Once spotted, I had to check it out and bring it home.  It's not the cheeriest of reads.  It is, however, strikingly informative.  I've been wallowing in some pretty grim statistics. 

As fate would have it, as I've been reading Shipley's book, I also read a New York Times article about a new book by Martin Seligman called Flourish.  Seligman is considered a founder of the positive psychology movement.  He came up with the term s"learned helplessness" to describe the conditioned response to arbitrary or inconsistent punishment and reward.  Shipley has noted this phenomenon among the poor.  I've had personal experience with it. 

 So how can a person, living below the federal poverty level, looking forward to learning how to live within a small trailer upon losing their home, without a lot of job prospects due to age, training and economy, how can that "person" flourish?  Flourishing seems a pretty ambitious goal.  At the very least, how do I look at the bright side in a situation that doesn't offer up a light side very readily?

Seligman, has formulated a set of five crucial elements of well being.

1.) positive emotion
2.) engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task)
3.) positive relationships
4.) purpose and meaning
5.) accomplishment

Seligman says, "Well-being is a combination of feeling good, as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishments."
Now, if I identify money as THE accomplishment, I'm in a heap of trouble.  If, instead, I use a positive viewpoint to define accomplishment more broadly, then I've got something to work with.

Seligman's ideas slap up against Shipley's book once again.  Flourishing for the poor would not seem an easy task.  It might even seem an impossible one.  Human beings rarely fit neatly into any theory or definition.  Working class individuals living below the federal poverty level aren't easily sorted into myths or anti-myths regarding how they got there.  The reasons are often varied and can't be attributed to just bad choices or outside circumstances.  In most cases, it's an elaborate interplay between self-inflicted and unjust systems and biases that continue to perpetuate "the of cycle poverty". (I'm sure I've read or heard of this some where but I've been referring to the set of circumstances and psychological profiles that combine to keep the poor "spinning their wheels" in the muck and mire of inadequate income as the cycle of poverty long before I rejoined the ranks of the poor.)

Seligman surprises me when he notes that people for whom good fortune comes too easily also experience "learned helplessness".  So both the poor and those with "too much good luck" experience the same feeling.  Apparently, it's not about the achievement.  It's about the path one takes to get there.

It is safe to assume that people hovering near or below the poverty level aren't racing out to pick up a copy of Seligman's Flourish.  Probably even fewer are reading Shipley's The Working Poor.  Who wants to rub their nose in their own misery?    Are the ideas and information provided by these two different books without merit?  What can be learned here?

Just suppose that as a society, we shift our focus.  We alter our definition of success.  We learn to value the things that are non-material, not financial.  Instead of the big house, new cars in the driveway and great vacations away from high powered jobs, we define accomplishment by the amount of personal satisfaction the things we do give us.  We value the quality of our relationships and not the quantity.  What if we define our worth, not by what jobs we have or what measurable achievements we've made but by who we are and how much enjoyment we find in life through the expression of our unique strengths and spirit?

If both rich and poor alike can experience "learned helplessness" the financial piece seems irrelevant.  As much as I'd like this "revelation" to take me to the bank with a huge deposit, I can't kid myself.  Being poor in America isn't the same as being poor in a third world country.  In some ways, it's worse.  Our dominant culture is awash with advertisements preaching to us about what we must have or buy in order to make our lives better.  We labor under the American Dream trying to achieve it when in reality few ever do.  It's very existence can make us feel like failures and hopelessly inadequate.  It's time to try another way.  It's time to redefine success and what it means to be satisfied in life.  Once the poor and the wealthy work together to dissolve the arbitrary and imaginary walls that separate us, we can devote ourselves to the advancement of all people and walk confidently into a brighter future.  One can dream can't they?

The Great Depression

English class was spent talking about the Great Depression.  It's background for reading Of Mice and Men.  It all feels too close to home.  The teacher uses a Powerpoint of old photos.  They leave me feeling bleak and empty inside.  I'm an old leather work boot dumped into hot water to flavor a questionable soup.

As one photo of poverty and despair fades into the next, I imagine stills from my own life.  Sometimes my expression has matched those of the people in the photos.  In their faces I see pieces of myself.  They look back at me with my own eyes.  This kinship with the antique poor is a heavy one to bear.

This burden presses down on me.  These are moments of lead.  The desire to lift this weight by telling the tale of its existence is especially strong.  I want to stand before the room and free myself with a simple act of expression.  
"Hello, my name is Carol.  I carry the heavy burden of poverty."
In my mind, the room embraces me.
"Welcome, Carol" they all say.
But this is only in my mind.  No one really knows my secret.

As I leave the classroom, I tell the teacher, "You know it's not so different now."
Yes," she says but it's just a polite off-putting consent.  With an awkward glance, she keeps the dam of words from breaking.  I say something meaningless and walk away.  I feel more empty than I did before.

The words I can not say aloud still press and surge within me.  I remember the images of the poor and how their faces were frozen in a singular moment.  Might they have smiled or laughed some moments before or after their faces were captured forever in time?

I fight to accept the fact that the void separating me from them no longer exists.  The memory of the lines etching their expressions opens into the deep canyons of my heart.  Some where from within the depths, I hear:
"That which does not kill me makes me stronger." (Nietzsche) http://www.blurtit.com/q689809.html I mutter a soft curse at these words and damn them to an eternity in hell.  A fitting end for something that opens onto fields of great pain.

More words float up from below:"This is the hour of Lead--, remembered if outlived"   (Dickinson Poem 341) http://www.shepherd.edu/transweb/amherst.htm I cling to these new words as if they were my only life line.  I climb over them, struggling to find a way out of the pain and darkness that a few old photos have opened up.  I curse them, the darkness, poverty.  Anger and loss wash over me.  They baptize me with fire.  From the ashes, I slowly rise.  "This too, shall pass,"  I say to myself.  "This will pass."

I paint a smile on my face.  I will not match those photos expressions.  That costs too much when I have so little left to lose.  Survival may depend on a single smile.  Inside, I give the one-finger salute to fate and begin the fight against the odds.
"No photos today, please.
No photos today."