CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

There is No Radical Transformation in the US Without Poor People in the Forefront

Image by Koshu Kunii.

An outreach mental health client of mine, years ago – I’ll call him Gregory – had (as a very young child) been beaten across the head by his step-father, molested multiple times by caretakers, slapped in the face routinely by his mother, and then, as the ultimate confirmation that reality had run astray, been told by his siblings that he had made up these allegations out of some spiteful delusion. Both his older sister and brother, Gregory, told me, had an intense, unshakable belief in the goodness of their parents.

This left him broken, powerless, angry and scattered, but free to justify his own transgressions against others, free to live a life of trivial, almost random acts of sequential retribution. He argued with store clerks, intake workers, car mechanics and all of the faceless officials who supervise poverty. The yearly meeting at the Housing Authority had him quaking with rage, as did applications for fuel assistance and SNAP benefits. Sometimes supervisors were called in to outmaneuver Gregory’s sense of injustice – trained flack-catchers, skilled at miming sympathy, but immovable in their intent to keep assembly lines rolling, usually managed to calm him. Occasionally the police were called.

Gregory, a young white man with no income, belonged to the group that Charles Dickens referred to as “the surplus population,” who linger like spare parts in a storage vault. US society both hoards and despises “extra” bodies; tens of millions marinate in the understanding that institutions of petition (courts, bureaucracies, mental health agencies, local governments) view the dispossessed as so many abstract items to be processed and discarded. Gregory attempted to work after dropping out of high school in tenth grade, but the challenges and strains of obedience proved impossible. Criticism cut like a blade. The Social Security System fights like a wounded animal to deny benefits, to make claims of emotional disability into a Mount Everest expedition, but after years of refusals even the SSI courts capitulated. Gregory was “officially” disabled, deemed eligible for a $700 monthly survival stipend.

Gregory became something of a caricature of the systems that frustrated him. He shop-lifted, found every way to return purchases with complaints, and used his charm to manipulate free merchandise. He hoarded his ill-gotten booty until his Section 8 apartment became a prison with no place to lay down or sit. Landlords threatened to evict him. With his childhood trauma driving his mistrust, he proudly accumulated a collection of conspiracy theories – that aliens were everywhere, that the Great Pyramid had been built as an energy generator by interstellar, reptilian wanderers, that Templars and Free Masons invisibly instructed the “hidden hand.” Both curious and dyslexic, he spent hours in a lonely vigil before The History Channel.

One should not mistakenly assume that people like Gregory have no value to the powerful. They shop in Dollar Stores, buy cheap food, plow their benefits back into the game via lottery tickets, cell phones and cable subscriptions. Their kids, if they have any, stock the enormous, bloated military that allows the US to inflict terror and extract oil.

And there are medications – mountains of pills gotten on the streets, off of the dark web, written neatly on prescription pads, or purchased legally in gas stations. Kratom, a deadly, addictive pseudo-opiate can be bought in most towns. Phenibut, a highly addictive, unregulated central nervous system depressant, has not been approved by the FDA, but can be bought online – usually as a sleep aid. In the United States of Insomnia, where people toss and turn privately, and seek relief one by........

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