So what options do the homies in West Oakland who have no education, no way to get/pay for an education, no job, and no skils have to “create options” for themsevles? Do tell so I can wander down the street and tell them the secret to being financially successful (as in “survivable”) in America.
You always speak in platitudes as if all that is necessary is for people to just open their minds and try harder. Life isn’t like that for a lot (most?) folks who aren’t in a good situation with lots of support, cultural and financial. A lot of people are at the point of wondering where they are sleeping in a few days or where they will get the cash to eat. Telling them to open their minds is just insulting.
It is your presumption to decide that when I suggest “creating options” that I must mean “engage in some abstract ideation”. I would say that it is the opposite - relying upon money IS more idealistic than actual survival skills.
Since I have never been in West Oakland, I am in no position to comment there. But I have survived by squatting and improvising in the northeast. Firstly, the only intrinsic cost of education is time. And when one is unemployed, there is much more time to learn, teach, research, etc then most people have. There are libraries, universities you can sit in on, and many educational programs which can be done online for free.
Also, the equivocation of an ideological symbol with “survival” is an old brainwashing tactic. Money is a great tool, but it is no more a means to survival than being a Catholic or a Teabagger. Part of the problem of knowing that systems of survival offer no guarantees, and may be levied against your autonomy. Not using money is risky as hell, but so are the alternatives. There are no risk-free options. But I think that for most people, there is more trust and security in their immediate physical community where people can know each other and be accountable, than there is some absentee landlords who you know don’t care about you, and who you will never even see.
Maybe the West Oakland homies could try being less consumerist. Occupy some disused ghetto and grow food in it. But just because they could, doesn’t mean they will. They might be more deeply conditioned to imitate their oppressors, which is a frequently occurring problem. Creating wealth is a better long-term investment than stealing it - or going along with people who steal it, even (especially?) if they are officials. Most of the neighsayers who reflexively insist that “It can’t possibly work” are those who are too scared to try to do anything differently, in my experience.
No, that’s only in the abstract! Nothing becomes of it unless people are willing to actually do things differently. Where is the effort applied? If for every dollar you make, you make your oppressor a hundred, nothing is going to help.
This is why they should be encouraged to organize and create institutions of their own, instead of being pitied and made helpless.
I’ve definitely been there, and it still happens. It sounds a lot worse than it is if you hold onto this as “the unthinkable”. If you haven’t been homeless, then try it. My experience is that people are deeply conditioned to be dependent, and assume that fixed-domicile living is the norm to be aspired to without having honestly thought about it much. It is another version of entitlement to assume that “survival” is a transitory thing which I shouldn’t have to worry about. Instead of insisting that people give me a chance, take care of me, etc - why not actually spend ten hours per day learning how to solve the problem of having food? Of having shelter? Believe it or not, when you aren’t wasting your whole day making somebody else rich by working yourself to death, you can accomplish a lot. For yourself as well as your community.
It depends not so much upon what one believes, but almost entirely upon what one does. If your work is really worth as much as your job pays you, isn’t it still really worth just as much if you were doing it independently? Is it measuring your worth, or theirs?
[quote=“popobawa4u, post:42, topic:68568”]
Since I have never been in West Oakland, I am in no position to comment there.[/quote]
If you know what a multi-generational black ghetto is like, you might.
That might work for you. It works for me. I can think of a dozen ways to educate myself but then I’m literate with texts as well as with computers, have a graduate degree, and know how to learn. For folks that don’t have any of the privilege surrounding these things and probably never even graduated high school, it is tough to say “just go learn things.” Folks are especially unlikely to do that when they’re just worried about eating and having a place to sleep next week.
Bullshit. Money buys you food and shelter and our society teaches everyone that it is there for that. Sure, discount the actual lived experience of folks though.
[quote]
Maybe the West Oakland homies could try being less consumerist.[/quote]
I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you walk up on a crew and tell them that.
When they’ve never grown anything in their life, don’t know how to do it, and the ground is poisoned from industrial work (which it is around here)? Sure.
When you describe how tough you’ve had it, you’re actually admitting that you haven’t had it so tough, because your words show that you don’t actually understand what it’s like for people who didn’t grow up with your advantages. Every bit of the post I’m responding to, for example, is filled with hidden assumptions that are due to not having really walked the walk. Truly poor neighborhoods don’t function the way you think they do, for a lot of reasons that aren’t fixable simply by having a can-do spirit.
[quote=“albill, post:43, topic:68568”]
That might work for you. It works for me. I can think of a dozen ways to educate myself but then I’m literate with texts as well as with computers, have a graduate degree, and know how to learn. For folks that don’t have any of the privilege surrounding these things and probably never even graduated high school, it is tough to say “just go learn things.” Folks are especially unlikely to do that when they’re just worried about eating and having a place to sleep next week.[/quote]
If you speak of “knowing how to learn”, then it sounds fair to assume that you recognize learning as a process. Doesn’t it work for anybody who applies it? Does it innately require money to teach/learn, or can it be done without it? Sure, when people start at such a basic level (we all do, at some time) of lacking abstraction and symbolic reasoning, it seems all uphill. I never finished high school either, because attending public school in my area was wasting most of the time I could spend applied towards learning what I needed to know.
Sure, because people tend to be motivated by honesty where money is concerned! Sorry, but that contradicts my lived experience! Money certainly can work assuming that one can negotiate an equitable deal for being paid in some, and that others are willing to take your payment. But do you merely use it, or allow yourself to utterly depend upon it? Is it empowering you, or (as per this topic) are others having you use it to empower them? Also you are implying causation, that money is a prerequisite for survival. Food and shelter don’t grow on trees, right?
As the saying goes, wish in one hand, and spit in the other. They can learn by doing. But if they aren’t willing to do anything differently, don’t blame me for suggesting that they didn’t wish hard enough. Of course pollution is a problem - but how many poor people ever buy a pile of clean dirt, compared to a television set that they don’t need? I have known many, many people who lived in extreme poverty who spent what little money they had on crazy shit because they were still duped into trying to “fit in” to a system of affluence and consumerism.
I am not suggesting that there is any magical easy answer to urban survival. But my experience has been that most people do choose to simply conform to what others around them are doing, even when it has been proven not to work. It is important to be critical, but this is not enough without changing how one lives on a daily basis.
You completely missed the point of what I said. It does work for anybody who applies it but you’re assuming people without an education or even an orientation around learning know how to do so. A lot of folks have never learned how to learn, especially if they didn’t do much of anything in school and dropped out without home support of learning or examples.
That is certainly not what I said…
So we’re back to the whole “if they don’t learn, they clearly aren’t trying” meme of yours, which is bullshit. I feel like I should just repeat that sentence three or four times for emphasis.
People have to have an understanding that they can learn, know how to do so, and have examples of it readily apparent to them to model it. This is why education is so difficult when, for example, you have households where no one has been well educated over generations and the orientation is simply around survival. You’re basically saying “If generations of poor, inner city insert minority Americans aren’t educated, it is simply because they aren’t educating themselves and trying hard enough. It is their own fault.” If a white coworker of mine said that, I’d call him a f’ing racist.
I’m actually quite skeptical that you’ve ever been that poor or part of a poor community. I grew up poor, initially, but my mother was from a white collar family so was raised around educated people, had a good education, and passed that on to me (and she went to college, eventually, when I was a kid). Most poor people don’t get that (and they aren’t white and male, either).
Just because you can sit down and educate yourself on the Internet (with your computer, net connection, etc) doesn’t mean other folks know how. Hell, a lot of folks out there are barely literate to be able to read a book and never have outside of school.
Are you going to tell me that if junkies just abstained from being high, they’d be clean too, so it is on them to fix themselves? There is a reason that education is a difficult problem and the world isn’t full of poor folks who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and educated themselves. It takes a dramatic effort, an act of will, to do so, or help from others, like teachers and programs. It doesn’t fall from the sky normally.
So, this suggests that people can somehow be universally conditioned to know a way to live without thinking much about it. The use of money tends to be that of a game, in the systems sense of the word. So, if even people with nothing can learn to hustle for it (even though IMO they really shouldn’t bother), why should we suppose that they could not just as readily learn some other less-destructive game?
No. I was responding to your insistence that the process of education requires money. If you want to move goalposts, we can instead suppose that security and social stability needed for a learning environment must be obtained through money also, but I don’t believe this either.
You are outlining a backwards plan towards subsistence. Where people naturally grow up “middle class” (ugh), go through university, and are then trained enough to get a job so they are then qualified farmers, or can otherwise pay somebody else for food. Are subsistence farmers usually the academic elite of any given region? Do people solve the money problem firstly, then solve hunger, and then finally have a life conducive to learning? It does not seem to work this way in much of the world. Or anywhere, that I am aware of. Farmers are often hardly educated at all! Yet, they can work towards growing food.
It’s not that people “aren’t trying hard enough”, it’s that they are trying at the wrong things. If you really need to learn how to survive, then apply some - ANY - effort towards stuff such as food, clothing, healthcare and shelter. You know, actual survival problems. And this does not apply only to people in the ghetto, that’s where you decided to direct the discussion. I think it applies to most people. Why should anybody get paid if nobody is willing to take it upon themselves to produce anything? Looking for compensation first is completely backwards.
Based upon my opinions? That’s not fair. I have had people refuse me benefits and refuse to hear me on social issues because I could not “prove” that I am homeless, or completely without money. But I am “educated” enough to know that proving a negative is, again, a rigged game. Dismissing my experiences rather than refuting my views seems rather crass and cynical to me, but I am unfortunately used to it.
I never insisted that the process of education requires money. Reading comprehension, much?
And we’re discussing poor folks, largely minorities, not farmers on actual farms, who are a vanishingly small part of the population (unlike poor urbanites).
No, you didn’t say so directly. But one could surmise this interpretation when it is assumed that organizing one’s life around a symbolic system (money) brings educational advantages which somehow surpass those who don’t use it. You accuse me of concentrating unduly upon willpower and effort, yet rather than focus upon the learnable techniques of problem solving, you start arguing for increased effort - the very position you criticised me of!
I would argue that being disenfranchised by one specific system does not make people “poor”. If a person’s work is worth something, then this is the case whether they are hired by a company and paid money to do it, or not. Direct cultural participation is the only meaningful “capital”. The discussion has gotten too circular for my liking, but the reason I introduced survivalism was as a counter-argument to the remarks of “financial success = survival”. The presumption that people need to allow themselves to be exploited in order to earn their right to survive. It is repugnant to me.
Yes, poor urbanites have more of a future as subsistence farmers than they do as “people looking for work”. Why look for work when there is work to be done everywhere? Organizing this amongst ourselves is a way off of the carnival ride.
My point is that education and educating yourself are skills. They must be learned and modeled. If you have no one who teaches them to you or models them for you, you won’t know how to do it. It is the exceptional individual who can learn well without being taught or shown by anyone how to do it. Most people have teachers, which is part of why teaching, as a role, has been traditional for some people for thousands of years and we create institutions and groups to do this job.
A poor urban kid is unlikely to wake up one day and know how to teach himself a skill without anyone having shown him how or where to go to get the information. The data won’t just pop into his head unless he’s some genius inventing physics from first principles, for example.
Where do they get the tools to do this farming? Where do they get the seeds? Where do they get the knowledge of how to grow the food? You think these things magically appear?
Hell, where do they get the land in an urban environment? If you say “use land not being used,” what happens when the owner recognized by our legal system shows up and takes “their” land back?
You can’t really think urban poor are going to magically have farming skills, knowledge, tools, and seed and just take over land and it will all somehow work, can you?
Why don’t you go do urban subsistance farming for the next year. You can only eat what you grow outside the system! 1…2…3…Go! Let us know how it works out and if your first crop comes in before you starve in a few weeks.
You really don’t understand how growing crops works, do you? You can’t just put a little pile of clean dirt on top of a spot in a toxic neighborhood (check out the myriad toxins in the ground, water, and air on the south side of Chicago, for example) and expect to be able to grow healthy food.
And will that food, whatever its condition, actually be there when you’re ready to harvest? Oh, you mean while you were off at one of your minimum wage jobs someone stole your produce? Or maybe it was rats? Too bad, so sad.
And even if you manage to harvest any food, so what? It’s fine if you just want to be able to have some vine ripened tomatoes or heirloom varieties of lettuce, but can you actually feed even one person from the single or at most double harvest before fall hits? Do you have any idea what it was like to eat in the middle of winter in the Midwest 100 years ago? Or heck, even 50 years ago? A patch of land in an urban environment is not enough to feed a family, let alone a neighborhood.
Poor people are not lazy…they’re just not idealistic dreamers who don’t have to worry if plans don’t work out perfectly.
Next February or March we should start a gardening/farming thread. I have a good book that talks about varieties, amounts, and schedules for providing for four people.
Not for the faint of heart when you really think about it.
The reason why most people in the US don’t die before 60 anymore is because of things like steam-power the Haber process and the fact that we can grow most of our food in some nice place like Socal or FL pretty much year round then move it where growing stuff is difficult most of the year.
The real reason why people do not usually die before 60 is actually mostly because of indoor plumbing and a little invention called the can.
Canning allows you to preserve food for months or even years.
Before indoor plumbing cities were rife with diseases like cholera.
No. If you look into villages without clean water you can bring all the antibiotics you want but cholera is going to run rife in an environment where people can’t even wash their hands. Everyone should toss these guys a few bucks: http://www.wateraid.org/us
