Old Lovers

Two old lovers
–ships beached
near the sea of love

in a cove off a bay
no storm can reach,
lean into each other
longing

not for past passion,
not listening for a poet’s speech
just listing, leaning each into each

by Jim Culleny
2009

By Dave Munger

For nearly a year now, I've been writing here about poverty in America and what it's like to be in my brother's shoes: Like millions of Americans, Mark is a man who has worked hard for most of his life but is now unable to support himself. For a variety of reasons, today's column will be my last for 3QuarksDaily, and I thought I'd use it to sum up what I've learned over the past year.

1. Poor people are just like everyone else. This should be obvious, but for many, it's not: Most poor people want to be productive members of society. They have dreams and aspirations and to the extent that they are able, they are working to achieve them.

2. Poor people are not just like everyone else. This is the less-obvious corollary. Nearly every poor person has suffered enough misfortune to render him or her incapable of earning enough to cover even the basic necessities of life; nearly everyone else has not. In Mark's case, his body simply wasn't suited to the hard, physical jobs he was able to find. Eventually his body gave out, and he was forced to give up his long-established independent lifestyle and ask for help from the government, friends, and family.

3. Poor people are not like other poor people. Some poor people are lazy, some are not. Some poor people are uneducated, some are not. For every stereotype about poor people, there are thousands—millions—of poor people who do not fit that stereotype. But that doesn't mean there aren't some aspects of being poor that impact nearly all poor people. For example,

4. Trouble disproportionately impacts the poor. For most people, an unexpected setback like a car breakdown or an illness is an annoyance, but for the poor, it can unleash a catastrophic cascade of events. If your car breaks down and you have only $200, which you were planning on spending for the electric bill, you may face a choice between living without power or living without a job: If you can't pay to get the car fixed, you can't get to work. Many poor people have no sick leave: Get so sick that you can't work, and you get fired.

5. Getting government aid is hard, dehumanizing work. When Mark finally realized he could no longer support himself, it took years for him to be officially deemed “disabled” and therefore eligible for Federal assistance. Worse, the process almost requires that a person abandon hope: “You have to convince yourself you're disabled,” Mark said at the time. “Your whole life you've been thinking about taking care of yourself [and suddenly] you're no good anymore and you need help.”

The process of justifying your aid doesn't stop once you are place on Social Security Disability. You still need to prove, twice a year, that you need medical coverage, food stamps, and continually demonstrate that you are disabled and unable to work.

I could go on, but one thing I've learned about poor people over the past year is that cataloging their problems doesn't help much.

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By Namit Arora

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

Anniversaries be they of marriages or births, are generally a time to celebrate (another lap around the sun, yeah!). They can also be a time of darker speculation: “What if I had stayed single, gotten married, married someone else, hadn’t been so career-focused, or hadn’t been born?” These “what if” scenarios are the subject of many novels and films (e.g., A Christmas Carol, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Family Man, and It's a Wonderful Life), because they link regret, acceptance, and possibility.

Anniversaries also focus our attention on particular dates or years. Two years ago, there was much celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth (1809) and the sesquicentennial of his publication of his On the Origin of Species (1859). In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty and Edwin Drake discovered oil in western Pennsylvania. The competitive pursuit of liberty through the consumption of oil has characterized much of the late 19th and all of the 20th Century. With regard to the recent sesquicentennial of 1859, my purpose is not so much to ask “what if?” (as in the stories and films cited earlier) as it is to ask “what now?” The result is that I hope to offer a way to incorporate the full implications of Darwin, Drake, and Mill’s work to get us to the next big anniversary in 2059.

How did we get to 1859? To understand Darwin, we need to recall Malthus whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population established the idea that food production increased arithmetically (or linearly) while populations increased geometrically (or exponentially), thus growing populations would rapidly outstrip their food supply. Malthus' insights informed both Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's formulations of natural selection and they acknowledged him explicitly in their writings.

Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 is most remembered for the principle of natural selection and its popularization into phrases like Herbert Spencer's (1864) “Survival of the fittest” and Alfred Tennyson's (1849) “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Even today, a reference to The Origin evokes the idea that life is hard and competitive. In a word: Darwinian.

The second great contribution of 1859 was Edwin Drake's discovery of oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania, which launched the American petroleum industry. Oil is an astonishingly energy dense material. A single 42 gallon barrel of oil may contain the energy-equivalent of about 25,000 hours of human labor. Oil also provides the chemical feed-stock for many items that we consider to be essential (e.g., chemicals including plastics and pharmaceuticals). Cheap, readily available oil has given us lots of energy to do many things and make lots of stuff.

The third great contribution of 1859 was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which advocated for the moral and economic freedom of individuals from government and other citizens. Mention Mill today and terms like utilitarianism, libertarianism (both upper and lower case), and individual freedom come to mind immediately. On Liberty is perhaps best known for the phrase: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Combined with the seemingly inexaustible supply of cheap energy in the form of oil, competition and individuality became the defining metaphors for the development of western civilization in the late 19th and 20th centuries. A selective reading of the lessons of 1859 would be that life, including the human condition, is a struggle, energy is cheap and abundant, and the pursuit of individuality and freedom are paramount. Does this not sound like America in the first decade of the 21st Century?

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by Joy Icayan

I was recently in one of those hole-in-the-wall drinking places with friends from the human rights community. It was a rather decrepit place, just a bunch of plastic tables and monobloc chairs and a small booth that served dirt cheap beer and street food. In the mornings it was transformed into a canteen. The toilets in the restroom didn’t flush. Vendors peddling nuts, eggs and apples came in and out. We went there at least once a week to talk of politics and personal lives and take advantage of the cheap beer. That night, we had brought a friend—a French volunteer. She was in her sixties, spending her retirement visiting the world and talking to people. It was her first time in my country, and since she seemed game for everything, including travelling alone to mining-affected indigenous communities six hours from the city, we decided to bring her to our little hidden place.

Now this place had a videoke machine in one corner and a television forever tuned to a horse racing channel in another. The videoke machine had one of those preprogrammed reels of scantily clad women, mostly Caucasian women in bikinis running along a beach, or pole dancing or walking or fixing their hair, or pouting at the camera. It was a constant barrage of cleavage and thighs and it went on whatever song you chose; eventually the clips repeated themselves, or the same women repeated themselves in different ‘storylines’. We were used to it; there were other reels you could choose, reels of marine life or cartoon characters, but most machines played the clips of the women. That night, someone from another table had requested to turn the machine on, and started a bad rendition of a love song.

Our French visitor stared at the video going on, it was just the camera doing a quick close up scan of a pretty woman’s body. We had been talking about mining. “Stop me,” she said “before I smash that screen.”

It had been something of a joke, of course, but until that moment none of us had seriously thought about what was wrong with the clips. Annoying and silly, yes, but that was it. It was everywhere–in the cheap bars, in rural clubs, even in some homes. And there was something rather ironic to that; that we would often meet there to discuss activism and the rights of vulnerable people, that at that time one of the most controversial bills in the Congress was something on reproductive health, a bill that proposed access to information and methods of reproductive health, and we couldn’t quite understand how people, a sizable portion of the population could oppose that.

“I really am going to smash that screen,” she said, and we knew her enough at that point, respected her guts, that we thought we had better leave.

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