Whenever someone knocked on the door or honked their horn outside the drug dealer that lived with my family would stealthily hurry to the living room of our dark apartment and peer through the blinds as carefully as he could. I could never quite tell if it was in paranoia or expectation and I didn’t really care to find out. He lived in a kitchen-tiled bedroom in the back of the apartment. Money was tight, though, and we had to make due.
I can’t quite remember how exactly the drug dealer came to live with us, but somehow he was there taking up a good part of what little space there was, and I was sleeping out in the living room on the couch. I do know that financial instability was normal for our family which always lived in financial poverty and we just so happened to have needed the money at that moment particularly bad.
My mom worked at McDonald’s barely above minimum wage and barely full time. I was her oldest son entering into a tumultuous late teenage years as a high-school dropout and she was barely 20 years older. The factory jobs she held a mere 10 years earlier during the 90’s had dried up, disappeared suddenly, and the layoffs hit her hard. Dazed, she shuffled into the low-wage service industry, unable to move up the ladder because she had trouble reading above the 6th grade level.
What little climbing she managed to do bouts of depression due to her bipolar disorder would rob her of her gains. Unfortunately, mental healthcare when you live in poverty is to put up with it or get so bad off they have to hospitalize you. She was often hospitalized.
Food stamps stuck around but the government cash seemed less reliable. The welfare reform of the 90’s added to her humiliation as she had to explain on a regular basis she had trouble finding work or keeping it. This constantly put what little relief that was available in danger of being inaccessible.
The kind of poverty I grew up with is often given little lip service, or ignored entirely, by politicians and officials. Far too many, even as they said they spoke for the poor, supported policies that hurt the poor more. Sure, they weren’t for cutting food stamps but they were for attacking the poor’s “problem of dependency.”
For my family and millions of others, the decisions of the Democratic party in their capitulation to Reagan doctrine left us out in the cold. They are complicit. They sold out. They betrayed their liberalism for access to money and the political power it afforded them.
When I think of Bernie Sanders I wonder: what would have been different in my family growing up with a truly compassionate government that cared for the poor?
Maybe the factory jobs my mom had wouldn’t have dried up when NAFTA and CAFTA were signed.
Maybe she could have had access to medical care and mental health care if we had Medicare for all.
Maybe we wouldn’t have to face humiliation at government offices trying to explain our poorness.
Maybe we would have had a living wage instead of scraping by on poverty wages.
Maybe we wouldn’t have felt invisible, disillusioned, and forgotten by the government that was supposed to be looking after our interests.
Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have been sleeping on a couch in the living room while a drug dealer took up one of two bedrooms in the apartment. Maybe desperation wouldn’t have taken hold for our family to get to that point. Politics has consequences. I’m tired of seeing the system that allows poverty and destruction of the lives of families and communities to stand while technocrats tinker at the edges.
That’s why I support Bernie Sanders. We need mobilization, we need action, and we need bold leadership. We need someone clean of corporate influence and money. We need someone with moral clarity and conviction. As Cornel West said,
We want somebody with integrity. We want some who will be them self because they are them self and they have such a wonderful self to be.
The poor in this country experience economic violence. We have a system that not only excludes millions of people; we have a system that is violently punitive to the well-being of millions of people for being excluded. We need someone who sees the violence in the system and wants to mobilize people to fight it rather than try to bend the system that causes the violence to be just a little bit nicer.
There’s a real decision here. We need to make the right one.