Tim Barrus: New York Times
There are times when I do not write about the Smash Street Boys. It is not always appropriate. There are other takes on life. There is life with kids. A huge part of who I am and what I do. There is life in Art. There is inner life. The is the external struggle with a world we as a species have constructed and contrived.
NY Times On the Middle-Class:
I am lower class. I will never own a home. I am always close to homelessness. I eat out of dumpsters. I survive. I’m old. I’m alive. But barely. Why bother. Poverty is so low, it does not merit being a class basically because we don’t count. Even the comment etiquette rules at the New York Times keeps us out.
Degradation, humiliation, dehumanization are embedded in what America is. The poor keep suicide rates alive. The state I live in is looking at a new, proposed assisted suicide law. Killing yourself is not as easy as people think. Poverty is not a life. I have worked all my life. There is nothing to show for it. Rent has always been half my income. I went to college. It opened no doors.
There is nothing great about America. Past. Present. Or future. It is so easy for people who are well-off to play the blame game and assign all of the above to my stupidity and supposed laziness. You think not having enough cash to send your kid to college is a bad thing. It is. But I think hope is when the grocery store manager kicks you out of his dumpster.
I am nor stupid. I am not lazy. Medicare for all? I am forced to utilize Public Health. It is not a system.
The last time I was there, I was ordered by a nurse practitioner to give a urine test. I have never done unmitigated drugs. I do none now. I am not an addict. No sex in forty years. No STDs. The clinic was crowded. I was forced to give urine to the lab in public. Life at the bottom is humiliating. The middle-class is rich.