Who Are the Undeserving Poor? Who Are the Deserving Rich?

The struggle we are presently engaged in will, I think, go on for some time; personally, I look at it as simply the latest acute phase of a very old struggle. Fatigue will set in, as it does in the later stages of a marathon. Indeed speakers have been calling it a marathon, but the marathon is, despite the crowds, a solitary struggle, and a little while ago a speaker at Tuesdays with Toomey happily pointed out that our present struggle is also a relay. A relay marathon, if you will. We carry the burden together. No one person can attend every rally; yet each of us needs to do whatever he or she can. 

With that in mind, here is a story that appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on January 15, 2014. I am no longer able to locate it online, so I post it here.

Philadelphia, January 2014.  It's 13 degrees.  It's 6:12 a.m.  It's very dark.  I'm sitting at the breakfast table with my wife.

"This is insane,"  I say.  She doesn't say anything.

I say, "The only thing more insane is that Congress left last year and didn't renew the extended unemployment."

Lois sips her coffee.

"So I'm going," I say.  To D.C., I don't say.  On a bus; she knows.

She says, "Isn't it your fifth anniversary this month?'

Five years ago my life changed.  My employer of 16 years decided I was excess baggage in a business downturn, and streeted me at the age of 61.  Thanks for that.

No, seriously, thanks for that.  Then I got to do what I really wanted to do, which was fight for healthcare reform.  A whole alphabet soup:  PUP (Philadelphia Unemployment Project), HCAN (Health Care for America Now), PHAN (Pennsylvania Health Access Network).  Not something I could have done while working for a health insurer.

I think I helped.  That's the downside to casting off people like me.

I also collected unemployment.  And I looked for work.  And I religiously attended the classes at the outplacement agency.

Here's a simple fact of life.  When you've been working for 16 years for a company with a reputation for mindless bureaucracy, and you get streeted at 61, your career is over.

The outplacement agency pretended that wasn't true, and for a while I believed them.  But in the end I came to accept the facts, even as others continued to deny them.

I collected unemployment for a year and a half, and it was important for me -- not just the money, but the validation that I was still a person.  Eventually, with help from PUP, I got a part-time job.  It doesn't pay much, but the people are nice, I enjoy the work, and again it's a validation.

And I've spent a lot time over the last five years sitting on buses, sitting in waiting rooms and cafeterias in D.C. and Harrisburg, spending time with people who are actually poor.  And I'm here to tell you, you can learn things in your 60's.

Our Puritan forefathers bequeathed us this dichotomy between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.  It's false.  There are just the poor.  They do what they need to do to survive.  And it's not middle class, and it's not pretty.  But I find myself loving every one of them, not just the lovable ones, not just the deserving.

The rich, on the other hand, have been getting away with murder in this country.  We can get distracted by their demonization of the poor, but what would happen if we carried the Puritan battle to them?

How many of the rich deserve to be rich?  There's a whole school of theologians who say that wealth is a signal that God likes you, but what would Jesus say to that? Or St. Francis?  Or the pope?

Dear me, I'm turning into an aging radical.  I got on the bus and got to sit in a room in Washington with a bunch of senators and representatives and poor people and lots and lots of cameras.  And maybe it made a difference.

See also For Athena.

Senator Skedaddle

Last Tuesday I was down in Washington, D.C., visiting Senator Toomey's office. Sitting in actually. Take Back the Capitol was a big, multi-day event with a lot of help from SEIU, but I just got on the bus with my pals from the Philadelphia Unemployment Project and went down for the one day.

And we were a bit late, so I missed the story. Pittsburgh got there before Philly, and here's what they told us when we got there. The nice person in the front office said that Senator Toomey couldn't meet with them because he was over in the Senate chamber casting a vote.

But while that was happening in the front office, the people out in the hallway - did I mention that we had a lot of people on Capitol Hill that day? - saw an unmarked door open. And out walked Senator Toomey and two Capitol policemen.

Our guys called out to him. I imagine them saying, "Senator Toomey, we are your constituents, and we are assembled here to seek redress of our grievances." I suspect their actual words may have varied from this.

But it doesn't matter. Toomey pretended he didn't see his constituents or hear them. He pretended he wasn't there. He pretended he didn't exist. And he scuttled away.

Senator Skedaddle. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Later on, I had a nice chat with an SEIU organizer from Pittsburgh or thereabouts named Julia. She was a good listener, and punched the appropriate buttons, and I found myself telling her what I'm actually thinking.

Much too late in life, I'm finally reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. Towards the end there's a chapter on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards." The guards are essentially the middle class, and, in Zinn's view, they have served to protect the wealthy from the poor.

As I was reading this, I flashed back to a very interesting moment in my life at Cigna. Let me set the stage. Cigna's headquarters in Philadelphia was in two large buildings near City Hall - One and Two Liberty Place. One Liberty was the mansion, and Two Liberty was the village. At the top of One Liberty were the seniors executives, their secretaries, and a highly efficient security detail. On the two floors just below them were the lawyers and a few other people - including me, briefly.

I wish I could remember the year, but I believe it was in the late nineties. I'd long been shunted off to the village, but I wasn't prepared for what happened, and neither were the lawyers. The executives decided they could make some money by subletting the two lawyer floors in the mansion, so they sent the lawyers to the village.

"But we're special! We're your palace guard!" You could almost hear the lawyers say this as they carried their cardboard boxes of desk items through the mall that connected the two buildings, followed by carts full of files. (Fictional visual provided for didactic purposes.)

Well, maybe the lawyers weren't so special. By the way, I think Howard Zinn may be the person who coined the phrase "the 99 percent." It's in the book, which has been around for a while.

If lawyers decide they're part of the 99 percent, it's only because their masters pushed them over into the village, where they have to hang out with the clerks.

I do think something happened, sometime between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. I think the 1 percent decided they didn't have to put up with Roosevelt's New Deal any more, and they could actually dial things back to the 1890's.

Will they succeed? I don't know. Will the lawyers actually line up with the 99 percent? I don't know. But I do know this. The 1 percent can't do anything without lawyers.

As for Senator Toomey, he probably imagines that he's part of the 1 percent, but he's not. He's just a tool. Maybe one day even he will figure it out.

And really, it's okay that he skedaddled. (I do believe the story. I heard it quite a few times, from different people. Sit-ins can be boring, except when they're not.)

I believe the Senator ran away because he is afraid of us. I hope he doesn't think we're going to hurt him - if he'd just look at us he'd know that was ridiculous. But maybe, just maybe, he's afraid because, on some very deep level, he knows we're right.

Having Fun Reforming Health

Recently a friend asked me what my favorite experience was, of all the things we did during the health care-reform campaign. As I started thinking, it occurred to me that we'd been at it so long I couldn't remember a lot of what we did. So I looked at my calendar and my old emails; we did a lot.

I joined fairly late. My first activity was a meet-up (this is a technical organizer's term that means meeting) on July 7 of last year, at the Locust Rendezvous near the Academy of Music. My first action (another organizer's term) was a rally the next week at a health center on South Broad Street.

Boy, did we do a lot of rallies. In September we rallied on short notice outside the Convention Center. President Obama was in town to attend a fund-raiser for the newly Democratic Senator Specter. The teabaggers were at high tide at this point – they'd been having fun at our expense, and it had only just occurred to us that we were going to have to counter-demonstrate if we wanted to win the war of words in the street.

Actually, the teabaggers weren't the biggest problem at this rally. It was the pro-lifers, who showed up with their dead baby pictures and a sound system that would have made a rock & roll band proud. We had posters, but no sound system. A lot of us got very hoarse that day, but we held up our end, and a few days later we had a bullhorn.

On a beautiful day in October we read the bill on Independence Mall, near the Liberty Bell.

I don't have a good count of the number of times we hopped in the HCAN van and drove down to Washington for one activity or another. It almost got to feel like a commute.

And, goodness gracious, we did a lot of phone banking. For me, this involved going to PUP's seriously overheated offices on North Broad Street. (I'd expand all these acronyms, but it doesn't really matter. It's kind of like being in the army – the acronyms are the words the troops understand.)

I don't enjoy phone banking, but I did it. A number of Pennsylvania Congressmen were on the fence about the health-care reform bill. Our strategy was to call people who lived in those districts and ask them to call their congressman. (Calls from people who are not constituents aren't terribly effective these days.) We had a phone system called Activate, which automatically dialed phone numbers for us, and then allowed us to transfer callers directly to their congressman's office, if they were willing.

It was a very effective strategy. Most people would say no, of course, but quite a few would say yes, and we ran up some significant numbers.

There are lots of old people in Pennsylvania. Many of them are sweet, and some are rather crotchety. We did most of our calling in the evening, which was when people were home. So it's late in the day, and it's cold outside, and it's a steambath inside, and I'm stripped down to my tee shirt, sitting at someone else's desk, using someone else's phone, feeling slightly light-headed, doodling around the hatch marks on my tally sheet, glancing at my watch, the wall clock, the clock on the computer, wondering why time is standing still. And the system beeps, and I have yet another voter on the line. It's an older man. I start in on my patter, and after a moment he interrupts, saying somewhat querulously, "You're bothering my dinner!" I immediately have a vision of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. The meatballs are frowning, and vibrating with anger. Perhaps a sign that I watched too many Walt Disney cartoons as a child. Or maybe it's just time to go home.

I was going to say that my favorite experience was the walk to Washington in February. Certainly it was the most significant, and personally meaningful, and downright odd thing that I did during the whole campaign. Why would eight people walk 135 miles in eight days from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., even in good conditions, let alone in snow up to their hips?

But there's another experience, only a single day, that I find has stolen my heart. Possibly because it was, for me at least, a turning point. In December, President Obama went to Schnecksville, Pa., near Allentown, to deliver a speech. It was a perfect, crystalline day, and we got to stand on that beautiful green lawn under a blue sky and go toe-to-toe with the teabaggers while we waited for the president to show up.

I think it was then that I knew the teabaggers would lose. They didn't have anything. They called us Russians and Commies and sang God Bless America. And so we sang God Bless America with them, and then quite a few other songs on our own, and then some of our women danced. I believe we even challenged the other side to a dancing contest, but they weren't up for it.

These are people who want it to be 1950 again, and they don't believe that people who don't want that can possibly be real Americans. Well, they're wrong.

We beat them that day. The media couldn't say the teabaggers had highjacked Obama's event – we prevented that – and so they covered the president's speech.

And we'll keep beating them, because we're about the future, and they're about the past.