March 29, 2010
Not a hipster on food stamps….
I’m a little late on a response to this, from Salon.com last week. I did participate a bit in the comments section there, but it riled me enough that I couldn’t really articulate a full response–my feelings about it have been fairly volatile.
Basically, Salon did an article entitled “Hipsters on Food Stamps,” with the tag line “They’re young, they’re broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?” and what could’ve been an insightful piece on a group that we don’t normally think of as using food stamps–the young, childless, highly educated intellectual/creative class–now finding themselves turning to them, or about the fact that it’s actually possible to eat decently on a limited budget, got turned into an article practically guaranteed not to shed enlightenment but to elicit reflexive outrage at entitled young “hipsters” using government handouts to buy luxury foods.
One of the subjects of the first article wrote a response about how he was portrayed in an unnecessarily frivolous manner, and some of the real issues he’s dealing with, which is more than worth reading.
My friend Steven wrote a very personal response today, so I figured I’d better get my act together, but what really elicits the following is a commonality of anger and indignation I’m hearing from both family members and friends–some of whom may be reading, and I hope they’ll comment–at people who use public assistance and the low-income: presumed beneficiaries of things like the health care bill, benefits that were part of the stimulus package, and a more progressive tax code this year. “The government just makes it too easy for people to not do what they’re supposed to do,” my mother said. A fairly common refrain from a friend with whom I debate often is “At what point are people ever going to be allowed to fail without the government to step in and save them?” I’ve heard more than once that I wouldn’t be so supportive of Obama, or progressive taxes generally, if I made more money, and a whole lot of consternation over the threat of policies which “take money away from people who work and give it to those who don’t.”
The first misapprehension to get out of the way is that we do in fact take a lot of money from people who work and just give it those who don’t. We don’t. You can’t be an able-bodied adult and just decide you don’t want to work, and live off of public assistance. Almost every available program has some kind of work hours or placement requirement.
Secondly, there seems to be a perception that the poor have it easy, or that we’re poor only because we don’t work hard enough, or enjoy being able to take advantage of government money. So let me share some personal experience:
I applied for food stamps once. I was in my stage management internship, on a stipend of something like $216 per week after taxes, if memory serves. I.e. $864/month. I actually tried to survive on that for a few weeks, tightly rationing 3 meals a day, no snacks…and then I was just too hungry. My stomach hurt all the time. I couldn’t think. I sold a toaster on Craigslist for $10 to do my laundry one week. So I went to apply for food stamps. It was a horrible, degrading experience which I do not wish to repeat.
I certainly wasn’t ashamed nor did I feel undeserving of them–I was after all working for very little–even my hyper-conservative, solidly anti-social safety net Republican father said “You’ve paid taxes; it’s just YOUR money.” Still, I felt…strange, out of place, going to the food stamps office. Like a well-educated, ambitious person like me shouldn’t need this, or someone who’s voluntarily gone to work in the arts has made their own bed and shouldn’t have the nerve to ask for help.
But if you weren’t ashamed to begin with, they’d make you ashamed. In the waiting room of the food stamps office we were treated like criminals. Very stupid criminals. Appointments were running 3 hours behind schedule and we literally were not allowed to ask any questions about why, or what was going on, or if we might reschedule. The room was windowless and I had a claustrophobia-induced panic attack. I finally saw a social services worker, who talked to me like I was a dimwitted child who’d done something bad. I was crying by that point.
I got denied for not providing a FULL bank statement, which was just a level of intrusiveness that I couldn’t deal with, so I never even got to the stage where you have to be fingerprinted. I didn’t bother to appeal; the initial experience had been tiring and depressing enough.
It’s not easy being poor; it’s hard, and it’s not only those who don’t want to work hard enough, or didn’t bother to get an education, or had children too young, who wind up poor. Sometimes, it’s people like me. Especially now.
I don’t consider myself a hipster; I’m nowhere near cool enough, to start with. I still qualify for food stamps based on income, though I’m sure many people, including some friends, would think that I don’t deserve them: I’m single, childless, relatively healthy and knowingly entered a low-paying artistic profession. And while usually I say that I’d have to be much more desperate than I am to repeat the first experience I had…sometimes lately I wonder if it would actually be the more responsible thing to do to go apply again. I’d be able to look out for my health better. I’d be able to save more money and pay down my remaining credit card balances faster (which I ran up mainly with groceries), and food stamps are a good deal for everyone: they return, last I heard, $1.71 to the economy for every government dollar spent. So every person on food stamps is actually helping the economy and their neighborhood, especially if they spend them on locally grown food, more than they would by struggling nobly and unnecessarily.
My point, I suppose, and the unintended lesson of the pair of Salon articles, is that it’s easy to condemn with superficial information. But reality on an individual basis is much more complicated.
March 21, 2010
How stupid and helpless are we?
Are we actually not only stupid and helpless enough, but self-loathing enough, to buy pre-washed, pre-sliced apples, packaged in 30 calorie single servings?
Chiquita thinks we are.
In case you can’t read the text clearly:
-Washed, sliced and ready to eat
-Only 30 calories per serving
-Individually packaged in stay fresh pouches
I could go on and on and on about the levels of stupidity here…the cost of a package of pre-washed, pre-sliced apples versus a 3-pound bag of whole apples, the unnecessary plastic packaging from an environmental standpoint, that there actually, probably are people who don’t know how to eat fruit unless it comes pre-sliced and packaged in single servings, and that Chiquita thinks that we will do this because we hate our bodies so much.
Let them know what you think here.
March 19, 2010
My generation, part 3
A few weeks ago, a note went out on the listserv of the Demosthenian Literary Society, the debate society of which I was a member in college at UGA, alerting members and alumni of extreme budget cuts that the state of Georgia would be asking of educational institutions, as well as cutbacks in a variety of state and local resources and services. Potentially on the chopping block are hundreds of faculty and TA jobs, Athens’ NPR affiliate radio station WUGA, 4H programs and cooperative extension branches across the state (cooperative extensions are usually departments within a university’s agricultural program, which provide a wide range of assistance and information to local farmers, or anyone really, on agricultural issues, natural resources management, or livestock care), and the state Botanical Gardens.
It was suggested by a chancellor that the budget gap could be closed by a 77% tuition hike.
Naturally and understandably, these proposals caused fear, concern, and anger among the student population, and a lively listserv discussion ensued about the most effective methods of protest.
One alumna, on the other hand, thought that when so many people across the state are suffering the loss of crucial resources, that college kids who weren’t paying tuition to begin with just looked spoiled and entitled for complaining about the loss of a radio station. (Most in-state students at UGA have eight semesters of tuition covered by the HOPE scholarship, which was the model for Missouri’s later A+ program.) Called out for appearing to suggest that college students who do, after all, pay taxes, don’t have a right to protest in their own interests, the alumna replied, “Again, didn’t say you didn’t have the right to complain, only pointed out that you look spoiled and petty for doing so.”
I argued that some of the resources in danger of being lost, like the Botanical Gardens, were not the “fringe benefits” that she characterized them as, but part of the very soul of Athens, GA, critical components of our education, that the cuts would hit students who DO pay tuition as hard as those who don’t, and that a 77% tuition increase would put the price of UGA on par with private schools for out-of-state students like me, which could gravely hurt UGA’s academic future.
This is what she said:
March 17, 2010
Hallelujah, it’s spring!
We interrupt this screed on intergenerational economic injustice for some St. Patrick’s Day cheer:
A tiny yellow crocus by our pond in Central Park.
Snowdrops at Belevedere Castle. For those who haven’t been, there’s a garden walk where they’ve attempted to collect every flowering plant mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare.
Alexander Hamilton, looking very handsome in my humble opinion.
And this. God bless the Irish.
March 11, 2010
My generation, part 2
During the 2008 primary campaigns, one of the things that swayed me severely away from Hillary Clinton and towards Obama was what I perceived as a really pernicious and mean spirited anti-youth bias in her rhetoric and campaigning. I tell this anecdote a lot, so forgive me if you’ve heard this particular complaint…In 2006, I was in Juilliard’s stage management internship, and also working opening shifts at Starbucks to make ends meet. So here’s how my days would go: I woke up at 3:30 AM, caught the 4:00 train downtown, my shift started at 4:45 and ended at 1:00 PM. I got a venti almond mocha on my way out and went straight to the school, caught a half hour nap at my desk and then finished up the previous day’s paperwork and e-mails before rehearsals started at 4:00 PM. Got home around 11:00 PM if lucky. Did it again the next day.
Anyway, on my Starbucks lunch break on one of these days (which occurred around 9:30 or 10:00 AM, when you’ve started a shift before 5:00), I read in the paper something that Clinton had said in her speech to the US Chamber of Commerce:
“We have a lot of kids who don’t know what work means. They think work is a 4-letter word.”
I had worked a 20-hour day, on the day that she said that.
During a campaign speech at Rhode Island College, she sneered:
“Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.’ Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be.”
It was a blatantly nasty attack both on Obama’s relative youth, and on the hope of his younger supporters that the political environment could ever actually be made better. Oh, those stupid kids, they think we’ll just sprinkle some fairy dust and it’ll be all better.
It continued, and continues, through the health care debate. In favor of the individual mandate that was the centerpiece of both Romney and Clinton’s plans, and of the current Senate health insurance bill (I refuse to call it a health care reform bill), the utterly predominant argument is that “young healthy people think they’re invincible and they just won’t buy insurance unless they’re compelled to.”
March 10, 2010
Talkin’ ’bout my generation
So until I read this column yesterday in Newsweek, I actually didn’t even know what my generation was supposed to be called. I do remember when we were supposed to be Generation Y, but for what I think are obvious reasons, it didn’t really stick with us. It didn’t mean anything we could connect to; all it said was that we had no better identity than whatever came after Generation X. A couple times I saw it represented as Generation Why, which I did like a lot, but it never caught on. Having never felt particularly connected or included or identified with people my own age anyway, I quit thinking about it eventually. I could never look at other people of my own generation and see myself, my concerns, my joys, reflected. (Reviving Ophelia was published when I was a teenager, and I read it but it meant nothing to me. Those girls didn’t have anything to do with me. It wasn’t that I didn’t have problems, but mine seemed completely lost on the supposed experts. It was like reading a very interesting treatise on a completely alien species.) At this point, we seem to have a spirit of nostalgia for all the same childhood TV shows, movies, toys, and school experiences, but beyond that, it’s hard to see that we have a particularly coherent value system or collective unconscious.
Or is it maybe just a retrospective illusion that any American generation has had that much cohesion?
But evidently the name that’s settled on us now is “the millennials.” It still doesn’t have much ring for me, but I guess it’s better than Generation Y.
Samuelson explores here the ways in which the idea of a “generation gap” or that of distinct generations with beliefs and perceptions unique to their experiences is, and isn’t, useful for tracing political and cultural change, and the ways in which ours, and our relationship with our government, could be adversely affected by this economic downturn far into the future.
Here’s the thing about generations, though: they never get to name or define themselves. Their title and the supposed dominant cultural gestalt is largely determined by the generations who write history later. Ours, the “millennials,” seems fairly unique in that there’s been so much presumption and supposition about what our generation means, what we’re like, ever since we were small children, by our elders, rather than in retrospect. And it feels unfair, to have the objects of so much anxiety for the entirety of the time we were growing up.
I think we might just be the most prematurely judged generation in American history, and that we may suffer uniquely, especially in the aftermath of the current recession, for the misjudgment and misperception of our elders.
{To Be Continued}
March 8, 2010
Dream Car
I saw this car on Columbus Avenue Saturday evening while walking to the subway from work.
Man, do I love New York.
March 3, 2010
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I really don’t intend this to be a blog primarily about education issues…they just happen to be the news articles that are catching my attention this week, and today proves no exception.
This is something that I’m very torn about. (In Middle School, Charting Their Course to College and Beyond, NYT 2/28/10) Students in the North Brunswick, NJ school district will soon all have individualized education plans, or “personalized student learning plans,” as called in the article. The idea is that every kid, starting in 6th grade, has an online profile which they can use continuously along with parents and counselors to chart their strengths, weaknesses, interests, and career goals.
I have long been ranting that kids need much more personal discretion to pursue their own interests, in school, more course choices, more freedom to do what they really want to do as the only path to true excellence in anything. So it’s very tempting to see any step away from “one size fits all” education, away from disproportionate focus on correcting students’ weaknesses instead of supporting and encouraging their strengths (which I tend to think actually reinforces the weaknesses in the long run), toward giving kids more insight and control over their college and career fates as a good thing.
But I’m sort of skeptical of this plan.
One of my favorite frequent letter writers at Salon.com once wrote “Be careful what you wish for, when it’s going to be implemented by idiots.” That’s sort of how I feel about this. It looks really good, foolproof almost, but it could go really wrong in the wrong hands.
Firstly, do the schools actually have the volume of course selection in middle school that would allow students to act on their career desires? Mine sure as hell didn’t–and we were in a relatively affluent district.
Do teachers and counselors have the time and knowledge to assist and encourage students in pursuit of off-the-beaten-academic-path interests? Are the schools willing to give the kids the freedom of time during school hours to really pursue what they want? Forgive me, but I doubt it.
Already, some of the school people quoted in the article are demonstrating some real wrongheadedness about what this system should mean for students:
“If you don’t know yourself and think you want to be a biologist, you may realize in your sophomore year in college you don’t like science,” said Mercedes Arias, a Linwood language arts coordinator who is helping develop the learning plans. “You should have really figured that out sooner.”
But, really? Maybe. I’m all for people learning to be more self-aware and honest about what they want, but demanding this kind of decision-making of 11-year-olds is a bit harsh. Especially in the context of the way our whole culture is currently structured, they haven’t had any chance to find those things out for themselves. Maybe going that far in science before realizing that it wasn’t for you was vital to figuring out what you DID want to do. Maybe that kid will still maintain a lifelong interest in biology; she just realizes that doing it as a career isn’t really what she wants. And the way that the school system currently isolates kids completely from the real world of work, you don’t really see how professionals in your field work until you get to college. Why the blame on the kid? Kids that young should have the freedom to explore, the freedom to make mistakes. Even big mistakes. Especially big mistakes.
And who really makes it to college before realizing that they really don’t like science? In my observation, the vast majority of my classmates were openly science-phobic a long, long time before that.
Secondly, I see the potential for this to become just another constriction on students’ lives and interests, or another avenue for tracking kids into essentially permanent trajectories based on testing performance. Under the guise, even the intent, of giving kids more control, it could actually give them less. It could be a real trap for kids who have certain things expected of them by even the most well-meaning parents or teachers. Imagine how this could go for kids interested in exploring something outside their main area of interest:
KID: “I’d like to maybe try another art class this semester.”
But that’s not in your learning plan.
That’s not working towards your goal of being a doctor.
That’s not at all what the Matchmaker test identified as your ideal career.
If I can use myself as an example…I was always, from childhood, interested in theatrical and performance art. I would beg for speaking roles in church plays. But no one would take me seriously, because I was a such a shy kid. Not that I thought I wanted to be an actress, but I was very interested in that realm. Only no one around me understood anything at all about the variety of functions necessary and careers available in the arts world, or else someone might’ve been able to help me out more with getting involved in a way that fit my strengths. I took an acting class in high school and got involved with the production of the school musicals, and everyone acted shocked, just shocked! that I would do such a thing–I was quiet and good at science. And I was thinking but this is what I SAID I wanted all along and no one would pay attention–you’re only shocked that I actually DID something about it given the chance. I even had one of those career matcher tests come back with “visual or performing arts” listed as my top match and no one would believe it.
I was even about to go to college as an English major. And then one day my junior year, I realized I like reading. I’ve thoroughly hated every single English class I’ve ever been in, because they just ruin the experience of reading.
So I entered college with a biology/drama double major. And no actual idea what I was going to do for a living. I was a sophomore before I knew–the very first time I even ever heard of stage management, I knew, immediately and without a shred of doubt, that that was what I was supposed to do. Was it a late discovery? Maybe, but it was the right time, for who I was and where I was. I do still take an intense interest in biology and am glad I have the background; I don’t look at all those years as wasted. Or the time I spent in acting, creative writing, journalism, or chemistry in high school; the broad and eclectic foundation of humanistic knowledge turned out to be a perfect foundation for what I eventually knew I wanted to do, even though I couldn’t have known it at the time. But according to language arts coordinator Arias, I “should really have figured that out sooner.” I’m sorry, but what does she know?
Many educators and parents say that creating learning plans for everyone can better prepare students for college, and motivate even low achievers to work harder by showing them that what they want matters, too.
I do appreciate the attempt at giving students more control and personal investment…but for heaven’s sake, what does it say that this is a fairly new idea–that what students WANT actually matters? And it shouldn’t “matter, too.” It should matter primarily. I’d be interested to see whether the schools are backing this up with available course selection, flexibility, and free time to pursue individual projects.
I think the potential for students to take more control and more interest in their own futures is high, but the potential for misuse or gross oversimplification by teachers and parents, or for this to become just one more burden on kids who don’t learn and grow on the same time line as everyone else, is also high.
At best, though, perhaps this could be a tool by which students could pressure their school systems to actually give them more freedom in support of their personalized plans.
March 2, 2010
Happy accident~sparkling cider!
So I was making pork stew a few days ago and was about to steal/borrow half a cup of apple cider from my roommate to throw in. (It gives it a nice slightly tangy sweetness that compliments the pork.) But when I got out the half-empty jug of cider, it was all bloated…which usually means “don’t eat it.” I opened it and sniffed, and it smelled slightly sour. I didn’t want to just pour it down the sink, as it wasn’t mine to begin with, and if it had turned to vinegar, it might not’ve been totally useless, so I just put it back in the very back of the fridge.
Fast forward three nights; I’m sitting at my desk when I hear the following sounds emanating from the kitchen:
CIDER JUG: {fizzy sounds}
ROOMMATE: Agggghhhhh! {sniff sniff} Hey, Emily, I think we made some hard cider! Come try this, it’s really good!
I took the proffered wine glass of amber, slightly cloudy liquid with apprehension and sniffed skeptically. It smelled…a little off, but not bad. I sipped.
And it was really good. Slightly carbonated and fizzy, very tart, but still sweet, with just a little bit of an alcoholic kick.
“I don’t get it, it’s not even past date,” my roommate said. I can only guess that wild yeasts and a faulty round of pasteurization are to blame.
So we’ve been drinking it for a couple days, and so far no ill effects. Still, I don’t know that I’d recommend this mode of consumption on a regular basis. It’s probably not a reliable outcome of just leaving stuff in the back of your fridge–we just got a lucky batch of wild yeast. It’s mellowed out and gotten a little dryer since we first tasted it.
I came home from a long day of dance workshopping yesterday and poured myself a glass, with just a little Smirnoff dashed in for oomph, to relax over an episode of This American Life, and went to bed early.
Yum.
