Tips for New Paupers

[bijou]

I found this linked on a British based board that I lurk on. It is a long read, I will try and pick out the salient points.

Little did I know that when I lost everything last year, I was doing research. At the time I thought it was just stupidity or bad luck or both. But now that the economy’s crashing, it turns out I’ve been out there gathering valuable tips for millions of new paupers.

And let me clarify, I’m talking real poverty.

My wife and I fell through many layers of poverty in a few months. First we revisited the genteel poverty known to grad students, the sort of poverty where you have scary dreams about the rent and eat a simple, wholesome diet towards the end of the month. But we fell right through that into the sort of Dickensian privation spoiled first-worlders like me never expected to experience.  That’s the kind of poverty a lot of people are going to be experiencing soon—because I’m here to tell you, it can happen here and it can happen to you. And it’s remarkably unpleasant. You may be saying “Duh!” here but you’re probably not imagining the proper sort of unpleasantness. So I’ll try to lay out what to watch for, how to hunker down when it’s not just a matter of cutting back or selling your second car but having no car at all, having no money for heat or food.   ...

  Car. Got one? Maybe you should sell it. Cars drain the last dollars out of you. And there’s something worse: cops can smell desperation, and they hate the poor. I didn’t use to hate cops much, except drug cops, but God, I hate them now. The real purpose of cops is to keep poor people off the roads. That’s their only real goal. On my way to an interview for a job that could have gotten us out of the gutter, a cop stopped me because my insurance was two weeks overdue—for the simple reason we didn’t have money to pay it. She gave me a $600 ticket for that, plus $120 for not having an updated address on my driver’s license. ...

Food Banks. These places, usually in the basement of a church (because churches are the only public institutions in the new suburbs of western North America) ...

Antidepressants. Get on them right away, if you’re not already. If you are, up your dose. Because it’s going to hurt. Doesn’t matter how much Marxist theory you’ve absorbed, doesn’t matter that you can put your fall into global context; it’s happening to YOU now, and it’s going to hurt like you wouldn’t believe. You’re an American, and you share that culture’s values whether you like it or not. So you define yourself by your job, car and house. When they go, you’re going to hate yourself. Don’t even bother arguing about it. It’s going to happen. Just take the damn Prozac.  ... 

Besides, if you have a dog you’re cutting down on your chances of getting a job. This one howls when she’s left alone, another legacy of her traumatic puppyhood, so one of us had to stay with her most of the time. ...

After months of applying for teaching jobs without even getting answers, the perfect job opened up for me at a local college. It was half creative writing, half teaching literature and composition, all my specialties. But when the interview started I realized I was no longer someone who could talk the quiet, polite, oblique version of self-promotion demanded by academic hiring committees. I was too deeply, permanently spooked by our condition. I was just plain wrong, unhireably wrong in every way. No hot water on the boat, and I needed to shave the graying wisps of hair on my big bald head, so I’d shaved in the McDonald’s men’s room on the way to the interview, with a cheap Bic shaver. You can guess the results: it looked like a bobcat had tried to roost on my scalp, and been evicted after a violent struggle. The used sport coat we’d spent our last $20 of Visa credit on at Value Village didn’t seem to fit nearly so well, once I was inside that humming, immaculate classroom where the interview was held. And I had become a louder, more desperate, excessive person. When I tried to sound positive, it came out furious. When they asked me, as I’d known they would, why someone who’d taught at bigger universities wanted to come to this small rural campus, I said truthfully, “I’d rather teach here in the forest than at Stanford.” It didn’t come out enthusiastic, it came out strident. ...

link

Apart from the dog, there appears to be no reason at all why one of the couple couldn't have got some job other than teaching creative writing to make ends meet.  It may be, of course that it would be beneath his dignity to take any old job as a temporary measure rather than wallow in self pity the way he did.

[mamacags]

The dog pound would gas their dog for free.

[JohnnyReb]

The dog pound would gas their dog for free.

One of'em has to stay home and take care of the dog.......but if it were kids...?????

[PatriotGame]

The dog pound would gas their dog for free.

In the state of Oregon they can kill themselves for free too. Not I am advocating that, I am just sayin'...

[DumbAss Tanker]

The dog pound would gas their dog for free.

That would waste an entire week's worth of fine Oriental dining, assuming he can get a bag of rice from that food bank.

 

[Chris_]

Dumbshit.

Change your names to "Juan y Maria Gonzales," go south to TJ or CD Juarez, dye your skin brown, come back and repeat "no hablo engles" over and over.

Free welfare, free health care, free housing, free legal representation, activists fighting for YOUR rights to have what legal Americans have, etc. etc. etc.

God, do we have to spell everything out for these morans?

[JohnnyReb]

Dumbshit.

Change your names to "Juan y Maria Gonzales," go south to TJ or CD Juarez, dye your skin brown, come back and repeat "no hablo engles" over and over.

Free welfare, free health care, free housing, free legal representation, activists fighting for YOUR rights to have what legal Americans have, etc. etc. etc.

God, do we have to spell everything out for these morans?

Well, you could save the trip. Just get some black shoe polish cover exposed skin and attend the Thursday night NAACP meetings. They give lessons every week on how to milk the system.

[Chris_]

Well, you could save the trip. Just get some black shoe polish cover exposed skin and attend the Thursday night NAACP meetings. They give lessons every week on how to milk the system.

Nope -- that gravy train has pretty much hit the cliff, except for community organizers, race pimps and socialists.  Illegal immigration is the hot welfare ticket.

Get with the times.