“YOU SAW THE job applications, right?” the social worker asks me and
nods in the direction of a bulletin board festooned with red
construction paper stars. I imagine the staff meeting where someone
asked, “You know what would totally liven this place up and make people
forget they’re applying for food stamps and other means of government
assistance? STARS! Fuck yes, I’ll get my tracing paper.”
I’m
sitting on a gray plastic chair and my crutches are perched against the
social worker’s battered wooden desk. I reply, “Yes, I saw them,” and my
voice sounds uncharacteristically timid. She is a woman in her fifties
with short brown hair and seems neither kind nor cruel. She briefly
makes eye contact before checking a box on the first page of a tall
stack of forms. I’m certain she’ll forget me by the time I hobble out
the sliding glass doors and into the parking lot littered with candy bar
wrappers and broken glass and other detritus that somehow didn’t make
it to the state-issued garbage can perched right there. I need her to
remember my case, though, and feel humiliated and desperate.
It’s
Seattle, January 2002 and this isn’t how I’d planned on starting the new
year. But four months prior, I’d experienced a severe relapse of CFIDS,
an illness that presents in many ways like M.S., and I’d found myself
in a wheelchair for the second time in a decade. By now, I’ve progressed
to crutches again but am still far too ill to resume work. My money is
gone and my parents have been incredibly supportive emotionally and
financially for the past ten years, but my depleted health has likewise
depleted their savings.
So I’m sitting in this florescent-lit
neighborhood welfare office with its scuffed walls and kids far too
young to look so worn out, hoping I won’t run into anyone I know. But
then, why would I? Through dumb luck, I was fortunate enough to be born
to a family of some means. I attended private schools growing up. At the
University of Washington my writing professors had been generous enough
to praise my work, as well as that of my peers, and so I had entered
adulthood thinking, “This might not be so bad.”
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Through
equally dumb luck, my immune, circulatory and central nervous systems
had other plans. By twenty-four I was in a wheelchair for the first time
and dozens of physicians had told me I’d never work again and that,
basically, I was hosed. After protracted physical therapy and tapping
inner reserves of near-psychotic tenacity, I’d proven them wrong. I was
never asymptomatic and was often intensely ill, but still managed to
write.
At the moment, though, just getting dressed to make this
appointment has zapped my physical strength and I’m worried if I’ll have
enough energy to drive the short distance home.
The social worker
hands me a packet so unwieldy it might hold the entire city’s allotment
of paperwork. I am bogarting everyone’s questionnaires, it seems. “Your
doctor will have to fill these out and explain that you’re too sick to
work,” she says. “Then we can proceed. In the meantime, you qualify for
emergency aid.” She’s determining the imminent course of my life with
the nonchalance of a barista making decaf instead of regular and I feel
even more vulnerable. I try not to take her tone personally: when I was
healthy, I’d worked as a domestic violence victim advocate during the
day while I wrote at night, so I know what it’s like to process big
decisions quickly. And I’m far more fortunate than the women and men I’d
see or, for that matter, these poor, beleaguered children only yards
away from me now.
“When do I need to turn everything in?” I ask
and again emit an unfamiliar voice. If I were meeting me for the first
time, I’d never guess I’m, well, me. The longer I’m in this office, the
more protective skin I shed. A few more minutes and I’ll bleed on the
linoleum below that undoubtedly has already been splashed with all
manner of fluids.
“The instructions are on the first page, okay?”
she responds with finality. She clicks a device behind her desk and the
dot-matrix-type light above her cubicle advances one digit. I’m still
sitting in the gray chair, but she has already moved on to her next
client, whose troubles probably will be nothing like mine but will
resemble them all the same because crises, like their bearers, share DNA
at their core. I reach for my crutches and she asks, “Do you need
help?” more as a way of expediting my exit than offering assistance.
“I’m fine,” I say. It’s the only lie I’ve told her during this intake.
*
Few
of my loved ones know I was ever on food stamps. I’ve had an incurable
and degenerative illness for 22 years and tend to be open about my
health, in part because I have little choice. I usually walk with a cane
or with crutches and most days get asked, “What’d you do to your leg?”
by misguided if well-meaning strangers when I go for my daily walk,
fetch groceries, or hail a cab. I give polite but brief answers by rote
and rarely feel off-kilter during these exchanges. Long ago, I decided I
wouldn’t dwell on CFIDS, but I wouldn’t deny it, either. Questions
organically arise when interacting with everyone from retail clerks
asking if they can carry my potential sartorial purchases to new lovers
inquiring how CFIDS affects my sexual drive. (Note: it doesn’t.)
But
discussing the period I was on food stamps summons memories I’ve shared
only with those in my inner circle, and very rarely at that. The
disdain or outright hostility I frequently encountered from grocery
store clerks or from customers in line behind me who scoffed when I paid
with tell-tale currency still reminds me of how close I came to losing
my autonomy and how that possibility lingers. And what people who’ve
never fought major illness can’t quite understand is that the loss of
autonomy can be as terrifying as the symptoms themselves. A few cells
revolt and you’re now looking at your former, healthy life through a
membrane: you can see it, but it remains agonizingly out of reach.
Despite your best efforts, you’re at the mercy of others just to stay
afloat.
So why delve into all this now? Because the U.S. House of
Representatives is presently considering a whopping $4 billion cut to
our nation’s food stamp budget. And if it passes, roughly four million
Americans will get booted from the food stamp program with little or no
recourse. Or, you know, food. Full disclosure: I skew left on most
issues, but have loved ones who are moderate Republicans. That the
proposed food stamp cut is spearheaded by Republican House Majority
Leader Eric Cantor is, for our purposes here, beside the point. That
responsible elected officials of any stripe could be so short-sighted
and brutal is amoral.
We can debate budgetary concerns ad nauseam
but it doesn’t change the axiomatic fact that food is an unavoidable
physical need and basic human right. And in a nation with ample food,
withholding it is punitive. That’s perhaps the most disturbing part of
the larger discussion: there are Americans who view themselves as
impervious to the possibility of food stamps, convinced their bodies and
financial circumstances will stay resolute in the face of disaster.
Because, of course, they believe on some level they are impervious to
disaster itself. That they’ve eluded it so far because of some grand
action on their part, not through chance. So by this metric, those on
food stamps must have fucked up big time somewhere along the line,
committed some mistake so egregious and irredeemable that food is now an
option that can be withheld at the whim of a legislative body, not the
sustenance without which carbon-based life forms die.
Such
reasoning is so flawed, it would be laughable if its repercussions
weren’t so destructive. Are there persons who abuse the food stamp
system, parasitic jagweeds who commit fraud because they’re emotionally
damaged and think de facto stealing is a-okay? Yes, of course there are.
Assholes permeate every part of society and food stamp recipients are
no different. Unquestionably, some of them are unlikeable weasels.
But,
of course, that isn’t the crux here. Einstein maintained imagination is
more important than intelligence and the condemnation of those on food
stamps handily illustrates his point. A large chunk of our elected
officials and their constituents can’t imagine they could lose their
health or their finances, or that the loss of the former will almost
always eradicate the latter. They haven’t experienced it, so the
possibility stays remote, like a tsunami they see on the news crashing
half a world away.
Those of us who have nearly drowned know differently.
(Credit: AP/Matt Rourke)
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