yesterday i went grocery shopping with my brother, carrie (his "wife"), and their daughter, summer. they get $300 a month from the state for any groceries they want to buy. i watched them buy some vegetables (canned and fresh), meats, cheeses, dairy, etc., and three bags of chips, four boxes of soda, dip, frozen snacks, a huge box of donuts, pop tarts, snack crackers, etc. they also bought me a candy bar and a tub of veggie dip. i managed to convince my brother to buy the free range eggs instead of the regular ones.as they were going through the check-out, carrie noticed one item rang up at $1.31 whereas the next item (the same exact product) rang up at $1.69. She called this out to the cashier and asked why. He couldn't really figure out why and i told her to chill, it was just thirty cents. she told me, hey, im poor, thirty cents means a lot to me. i told her that if thirty cents really meant that much to her, she wouldnt be buying chips and all that other shit. she told me she buys what she likes. we went back and forth awhile, but i think my point was missed on her. then we got to their house, and they were pissed that they cut their cable without a notice. they were overdue, but they felt they should have been given a notice.
sigh... if you were really poor, you wouldnt "buy what you like." you would buy what would give you the most nutrition for your dollar. maybe you are behind on bills, but the state gives you a shit load of money every month for food, so really that thirty cents DIDNT matter. i want to export all americans to live in senegal for a year. god, it wouldnt even make a difference to so many, would it? wouldnt it just become some horrid memory that they were glad to have "somehow survived" through?
i mean, it just makes me think of ponge. right now his family is so broke they are not eating breakfast. and his isnt even *that* poor a family. i mean, they have a house with cement walls, a toilet, running water. or my friends abdoulaye, ousmane, and paupis. they all rented a room together - no nothing, just one small room. and between them all they couldnt get enough money together to pay for rent - 15,000 CFA a month. twenty five dollars. it took forever to get laye (abdoulaye) to admit what was going on, and even longer for casie and i to get him to let us just pay for his room.
we had to be very convincing. i told him, look, i did nothing to be in the financial situation i'm in. i was just born into it. i know you work hard; but this is your situation, and you did nothing to be in it, either. so just accept the money, i know you would do the same for me. and its not going to deprive us of anything, and it will make us happy. he didnt accept it for days. finally, he accepted. we didnt tell anyone...like an honor sort of thing. ...
the world is all fucked up. i wonder what idiot thoughts i harbor? i wonder what things i say that other people just look at and think about how clueless i am?
i think one thing i need to work on is understanding just how fucked up and ignorant people can be. im reading walleye warriors. its about the anti-treaty movement and the treatment against native spearfishing in northern wisconsin. basically, the laws decided to uphold treaty rights (spearfishing within limits on certain non-reservation lands) so a bunch of ignorant people started harassing and physically threatening the spearfishers in such a way that it wasnt really safe for them to exercise their rights. like the law said they had these rights, but then they didnt have them anyway due to public reaction. which the law then did nothing about.
all these anti-treaty hate groups started organizing... apparently there were even bumper stickers saying shit like "save two walleye - spear a pregnant squaw." this is not two centuries ago, this is in the late fucking eighties. i have just gotten to the part where it talks about the "counter" hate-group organizing that went on.
sometimes im amazed the world goes round at all.
