Eat The Rich

I’ve been saying this a lot lately and kind of hoping someone will get bothered or curious about it, but no one has, so I am going to gratuitously explain why I think it’s important that we all make “eat the rich” our own mantra.

First of all, why eat the rich? They don’t taste very good. They are usually past their prime and pumped full of preservatives and chemicals. Plus there’s the tangential concern that cannibalism is frowned upon in our society.

Being rich is immoral. I was convinced of this by A.Q. Smith’s article “It’s Basically Just Immoral to be Rich.” Many utilitarians have made similar arguments, most notably Paul Singer, a philosopher who promotes philanthropic giving to the extreme. Other supporters include Jesus, several Old Testament prophets, and quite a few theologians since then. The long and short of Smith’s argument is that it doesn’t matter how you got rich, the extreme amount of suffering and struggle caused by poverty gives rise to an ethical burden on the wealthy not to keep their wealth.

While this isn’t an unpopular opinion in the history of ethics, it’s an unpopular practice, especially under capitalism.

If you find yourself wealthy, give your money away, like most of it, anything more than, say, $70,000 per year. If merely gifting makes you uncomfortable, create jobs. Pay your employees better.

This last bit is a concession to resistant capitalists. Giving people cash is a pretty sure way they will get their needs met, but cash assistance is unpopular because we view poverty, not wealth, as morally reprehensible.

Let’s refocus though, because we were talking about eating rich people, not convincing them with moral philosophy to change their ways. There’s a carnal difference.

I want wealth to be suspect. I want the accrual of large sums of money to be so repulsive in our culture that rich people are afraid to be rich. I want them to be performatively philanthropic, because to be wealthy is worse than cannibalism.  

(If you are feeling defensive right now, it’s either because you are rich, or you wish you were rich, and you should feel ashamed of yourself and your perversion).

So eat the rich. While you may want to dismiss such a directive as hyperbolic, it is meant to erode our collective agreement that being rich is a moral good. It is not.

Eat Jeff Bezos. Eat Brett Kavanaugh. Eat Elon Musk.

Then, make policy changes. Make it easy to get food stamps, cash assistance, and housing assistance. Make it hard to be wealthy. Because our spending on social programs is peanuts compared to the massive amounts of capital accumulated by the wealthiest people in the world, wealth accrued while evading taxes, wealth accrued while employees subsist on government assistance, despite working full time, wealth accrued while benefiting from a system that supports white, straight, cis, able-bodied men, and actively excludes everyone else. Stop worrying that someone who gets a few thousand dollars per year in government benefits is gaming the system, and start worrying how someone making millions of dollars in a year is evading taxes. Impose steep inheritance taxes.

Our culture is so biased toward protecting wealth, that we are still just fighting for a living minimum wage, but there has been no discussion around a wage ratio. This would create a dependency between the lowest paid workers and highest paid workers. If a CEO wants to make a lot of money, their employees also need to make a lot of money.

I do want to make policy changes, but until then (and maybe even after), I will do my best to be performatively repulsed by the rich. I won’t keep my distrust private. If you’re rich, I think you are bad and deserve public censure until you prove otherwise.

Eat the rich. They are the leeches of our society.

Eat the rich. They are bad at sharing.

Eat the rich. They break laws and use their money to cover it up.

Eat the rich. They don’t put their money back into the economy, but you do.

Eat the rich. They live in gated communities.

Eat the rich. They voted for Trump.

Eat the rich. They are liars and thieves.  

Eat the rich. Eat the rich. Eat the rich.

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When I was Homeless in Seattle

In 2013, I was homeless.

It was 5 months, August through December.

I was lucky, because I never had to sleep outside.

I put all my things in storage, and I slept on some friends’ couch or my then-boyfriend’s couch.

I had a small selection of clothes and I went everywhere with my laptop (borrowed from a friend who had an extra one).

I was working, but couldn’t afford a place by myself. Honestly, I still can’t.

The uncertainty, the stress of applying for food assistance, the strain on my friends’ lives who helped me, the daily anxiety, it was awful. Thinking back on it, I can’t imagine what I was thinking starting a relationship while I was in that situation. I didn’t tell my boyfriend I was on food assistance, but he knew I was homeless—even half joked once about how I was dating him for his money. All of this reminds me of how classist this particular boyfriend was and all the reasons why it’s really good things didn’t work out.

During this time, I also read an article on poverty by Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth. If you haven’t read either, I encourage you to do so.

My parents kept telling me to move back to Minnesota. My therapist and I agreed that I should keep trying as long as I was working. Moving back would have meant giving up at the time.

I almost moved to the eastside to rent a room from a friend of a friend. She wanted $500 per month (which today sounds like a dream). I was making about $1500 per month after taxes and I wanted to save up for a deposit on an actual apartment. I couldn’t afford a third of my monthly income for temporary housing. I could only afford $300 per month. She didn’t seem to understand and kept offering the room at $500, like I could somehow just be flexible. Also, I was off food assistance now, because if I worked a full 40 hours per week, my gross earnings put me $20 over the cutoff. So, I had to pay for food, a bus pass, my cell phone (still a dumb phone), my storage unit, student loan payments, and still have enough money in three months to put a deposit down on an apartment—three months was the length of my contract for the job I was working at the time.

Then help arrived: my cousin was moving from California to Seattle. His parents were financing him until he got on his feet, and they offered to rent a 2-bedroom apartment so that I could stop being homeless.

They covered most of my rent and utilities for 2 years. I floated my cousin $300 for rent when I was working (which was only sometimes).

By the time I moved out, I had a full-time job with benefits. While I still can’t afford Seattle rents, I can afford to live here with a roommate. But it took 2 years and a lot of money from my aunt and uncle. I lived somewhere nice with in-unit washer and dryer. I basically won the lottery.

It’s important to understand some things when you are talking about helping homeless people.

• Studies show that it takes an average of 20 years of practically nothing going wrong to get out of poverty (I’m white, and I’ve had help, so it probably won’t take quite that long for me).

 

• People need what I got—2 years of housing—but sometimes, most of the time, they need it from the state, because their family doesn’t have the kind of resources my aunt and uncle do. Being able not to worry where I was sleeping changed my life. I overcame the worst of my depression and anxiety. I kept my room clean—like for the first time in my life. I bounced back from injuries caused by an accident on a bus. These are things that people in ultra-tiny houses and temporary shelter don’t have space to do—literally or metaphorically. I’m not saying we need to give every homeless person in-unit washers and dryers, but our standard for getting people off the streets needs to be better than a roof and four walls. It needs to be better than a dormitory filled with strangers. People need breathing room. They need keys and doors with locks to keep their stuff safe—even shabby stuff. And they need enough security where they aren’t constantly worried that tonight is their last night indoors. That includes people suffering from mental illness and addiction.

Seattle, huge swaths of it, has forgotten this—and perhaps never bothered to know in the first place. They think it’s ok to dehumanize and demonize people on the streets. These are not lazy people. They are people who started out without a lot and got less and less, even as the people who started out with enough got more than they knew what to do with.

I continue to be in favor of the employee head tax that the city council just repealed. I am in favor of a state income tax and capital gains tax. There is no imaginable reason why we should have two of the richest people in the world living in King County while we have more homeless people than New York City (a city with 11x our population).

The way we treat our most vulnerable matters. It doesn’t matter if we protect big businesses. They have so much going for them, because they already have enough. We need to take care of the people who don’t have enough. Those people, you’ll find, will most often be people of color, neural a-typical, LGBTQIA+. They will be the people whose families have neglected them, whose generational wealth has been stymied over centuries of oppression, who don’t have affluent aunts and uncles. If we’re going to be a progressive city, we need to do this and do it right.

Pretending not to be Poor

I have, for as long as I can remember, tried to pretend not to be poor.

You don’t have to smoke or have bad teeth or live in a trailer park to be poor. You don’t have to say “ain’t” instead of “isn’t” or “seen” instead of “saw”. You also don’t have to be homeless or car-less or live in government housing. You don’t have look like you don’t have it together. It just takes some unexpected medical bills, a car accident, or an attempt at starting a business which flops. American poverty has a lot of different faces. This one is mine.

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I don’t know when I first noticed that my family was poor. I must have been quite young, not older than four or five. I remember sitting at the top of the basement stairs when I was supposed to be in bed, listening to my parents’ argument about finances. They weren’t yelling or even loud, but they might as well have been. I remember empty kitchen cupboards, perfect for playing hide-and-seek. I remember food that didn’t come from a grocery store. I remember hating powdered milk and the kind of canned vegetables that I’m pretty sure no one has ever liked. Does anyone actually eat creamed corn?

When I was a kid, getting brand new clothing was an event. Most of what I wore were hand-me-downs from my sister or my mom’s friends with older children. Otherwise, it was from thrift stores. Target and Kohl’s seemed high-end. I will not pretend that I wasn’t delighted when I’d open up an entire trash bag full of clothes my size. I didn’t care if someone else had worn them before; the sheer volume of clothing was exhilarating. Despite this, I had learned that clothes played a significant role in how people perceived me.

We pick up on this from a young age. Boys want to wear the right sports jersey or tennis shoes. Girls need the latest hair accessories or brand of jeans. It is astounding how much of our identity is expressed and adopted through the clothes we wear.

It didn’t take long for me to develop both a contempt for youth fashion norms and an advanced sense of style, especially once I was old enough to work a summer job and could pay for my own clothes. Even before this, when I still thought I wanted to wear band t-shirts, flared jeans, and Vans, I had begun trying to conceal that I was poor. I discovered that people around me didn’t quite get what I meant when I said my parents couldn’t afford something.

One incident still stands out to me. I was spending the day with a friend from church. She had instructed me not to eat too much of whatever we were snacking on, because her parents were poor, and they needed to save money. I was a little confused, because we had gotten the snack from a pantry packed with food in the brand new house that her parents had just built. That just didn’t really seem like being poor to me. She explained that they were poor because they had just built the house. I couldn’t articulate at the time what was wrong with her comparing her parents’ financial situation to mine, but it just didn’t quite add up to me.

My house growing up, while owned by my parents, was in a constant state of disrepair. The bathroom was unfinished for many years; the kitchen had no flooring; the front steps were crumbling; we had remodeled the upstairs, replacing the breaking vegetable board with dry wall, but had never quite finished. We had only three bedrooms for our eight-person family.

Looking back, I understand why my mom would have melt-downs and go on cleaning rampages. Having a clean house was the best she could do when she couldn’t afford to fix the water-damaged ceiling or buy us new bed linens.

After my experience with my friend complaining about being poor in a completely failed attempt at being relatable, I decided to talk about it as little as possible. There was a long list of things my peers at school had that I knew I couldn’t have. This was especially apparent in my honors classes, where my classmates usually came from small, middle class families, who had lived in the city for generations.

Knowing the power of clothing, I invested in my wardrobe. I got cute shoes, fancy shirts and skirts. I dressed with sophistication. It wouldn’t be enough to fit in. Fitting in was for boring people. I had to out-dress those around me. Of course, I was an awkward teenager, so I think the closest I came to real sophistication was getting a black, velvet dress from Macy’s and wearing it to my winter formal. Otherwise, I was probably just mostly awkward.

Instead of being a normal senior in high school, I went to France. This might seem alarming given the picture I’ve painted of my childhood. But you won’t be surprised that I did extensive research and found the cheapest program so I could spend my year abroad. I don’t know how or why my parents contributed as much as they did, but I got there. It was one of the most difficult things I have done, and the reward was well worth it. I got to sit in coffee shops and sip Espresso, see Paris twice, Spain twice. I made friends and flirted with a boy name Valentin while he played the piano. I ate incredible food, learned how to cook some of it too. I learned about fashion, and got way ahead of the game, wearing skinny jeans and scarves well before they caught on in the States. I fell in love with one of my host families, and still get homesick for them. I did almost all of this for free. Despite my 70 EURO per month allowance, my life was so very, very rich.

I returned from France with an even more advanced sense of style and an acceptance letter to the college of my choice. I had become so very good at pretending not to be poor that I decided to go to a private college. Anything that I didn’t get covered with grants and scholarships, I paid for with student loans. Every year there was a shortage in my financial aid package, and I had to do battle with them to find out how to make up the difference, which really just resulted in more loans. This was embarrassing, and there were many tearful phone calls to my parents.

One nice thing about college is that almost everyone is kind of poor, so most of my experience felt like it had more of an equalizing element. However, one evening, during a conversation with a group of students over tea and toast, the subject turned to class and education. They were speculating on the likelihood of the poor being able to succeed in education, given the typical differences in social norms. I remember feeling as though they were missing something important. They were right that a lot of people who grow up in a certain income bracket would probably have a more difficult time getting to and succeeding in college. Their parents are more likely not to value education in the first place, so that as young as kindergarten, they are already behind their peers. This gap increases over time, making college a non-option even before anyone ever suggests it. However, they were missing another option: people who were raised by educated people, but were still poor. I tried to describe the nuances of pretending to be a member of the middle class. I failed. The group didn’t understand how I could be sitting there in my nice clothes being poor. I was playing the part too well.

This is still an issue today. When I wasn’t working, and I was homeless at the end of last year, I stressed about finding a midpoint between struggling-to-get-by and responsible-adult-who-isn’t-just-looking-for-handouts when I signed up for food assistance. Meanwhile, I am well versed in bourgeois conversation. What’s more is I have a degree and can talk circles around most people. How could anybody guess that in the two years since graduating college, my average income has been about $14,000?

I don’t know why it matters that I try to pretend not to be poor. I try to eat organic and free-range foods. I talk about culture. I attended college. I get good haircuts. I even get massages sometimes. I go out to restaurants with my friends and offer to pay for coffee. Sometimes, I buy the good butter instead of the cheap stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t do these things. Maybe I should face my poverty, and tell my friends that all they get is a card for their birthday, as long as I can afford that. Maybe it’ll just be a letter written on some borrowed printer paper. Maybe I should live that way. Why do I pretend not to be poor? I think it’s because I want to connect to people; I want to be seen and heard. I want to have something to offer and not be constantly taking.

Once, in college, I was really running low on cash, and a bunch of my friends got together at my apartment. I hadn’t seen most of them in quite awhile, and we didn’t really have anywhere to hang out, unless I opened up my living room. I made all the food I had left because they were hungry, with no idea how I was going to get more food. What I offered my guests was supposed to last me another week. We still had a ton of fun. We laughed and talked, and people complimented my cooking. Fortunately, the next day, I got an e-mail informing me of extra grant money that hadn’t been included previously in my financial aid package, and I got the funds I needed to make rent and buy groceries for the rest of the quarter within the next couple days.

I don’t ever want to do that again. I don’t want to be so hopelessly broke and ashamed of it that I invite people over and offer them something that I absolutely cannot afford to give. However, I am so glad they came, so glad they enjoyed the food, so glad we spent time together, connecting.

Pretending not to be poor is a form of hiding. It’s fueled by shame. It’s fueled by the fear of being disconnected. Most people, when they learn about my financial situation, get really uncomfortable. They either say something completely oblivious or insensitive, or they change the subject. Pretending not to be poor is an attempt to avoid this experience, to make the world think I am a capable adult, to make myself think so as well. And in spite of this, I have learned that generosity is better than buying more razors to shave my legs. Connecting is better than having a new computer or having an expensive hobby. I can go an extra month without getting a haircut if it means I can go out to drinks one extra time with a group of people dear to me.

This is my story. I don’t want to pretend any more. Poverty is about the state of my bank account. It is not who I am. I am courageous. I am daring greatly.