by Lucy S.
10:30 pm. I've been reading, thinking about, and writing feedback for student essays all day. Mostly, I love this last batch of essays. Reading about their lost loves ones, frightening health struggles, cherished experiences, bewilderment, anxiety - I can't help but feel closer to them.
From what I've come to know of them, I think they're all upper-middle-class. Some of their families might even be wealthy. (I don't know where the line is supposed to be now; when do people cross over into the 'wealthy' category?) What I know is that their lives seemed so different from mine or my kids' lives or the lives of the people I've been close to my whole life in their opening letters at the start of the semester. I heard from homecoming kings and queens; football quarterbacks for their high school teams; junior hockey devotees; graduates of private K-12 schools; people who went to summer camp every year (my kids have never been to summer camp in their lives!); people with family summer lake homes... But I heard also from a kid who said he almost lost his "best friend" -- his dad had a heart attack (the homecoming king). Later the 18-year-old whose family owns the lovely lake home wrote of coming home from summer camp and being told the news (in the lake home, while her grandparents put away the raspberry jam they'd made) that her mother had discovered she had breast cancer and needed a double mastectomy. I read an essay by a quiet student (who told me he loved poetry) that began: "I was born with a hole in my heart." In this latest batch of essays, one student wrote about one of his closest friends taking his own life on the same day that this student started college for the first time. Another wrote about being in a car with his grandpa driving (his Poppa) when the grandpa suddenly passed out with his foot on the gas pedal. This student had to quickly turn the wheel to keep them from crashing into people at 60 mph. His Poppa had had a heart attack. He wrote of his grandfather's consistent respect for people, his resiliency, and his eventual recovery, against the odds. Beautiful, poignant essays - all of these, and others.
I've been turning all of this around in my head all semester. It's a strange thing for a working-class person like me to teach these new adults. I start to think the old liberal cliche that contains some truth, but also deceives in its easy feel-good conclusion: We're just people. They suffer. Their loved ones suffer and die. They worry about their individual futures. They struggle with their awakening realizations about injustice. They struggle with guilt, outrage, confronting their own too convenient judgmentalism. As I do. And I think: haven't their parents given them the childhoods many of us WISH we could have given our kids? Is it wrong to spend summers at a lake? I get confused. It's not wrong, I think -- what's wrong is the horrific scarcities forced on so many others. What's wrong is that some people -- the majority -- live with the pains of the upper classes, but at the same time, live with deprivations that exacerbate the losses and illnesses.
This is true at my level, too, though. Most people in this world live so much more destitute than I do. The radical Left often refers to this disdainfully as White Guilt. (Some of the Right does as well.) It's not always White, however. It might more broadly be termed the guilt of the materially comfortable in a world where most people are not comfortable.
My own relative comfort at this point in life comes after years of moves, a bankruptcy, months here and there staying with my parents. When Ryan was born, we lived in a three bedroom basement duplex. And still, that comfort is precarious. It requires that so much holds together. Yet none of that compares to the most desperate levels of poverty. The desperate levels scare me.
My Aunt Dolores called me tonight. She told me that her brother Jerry's wife Bertha needs dental surgery. Bertha's in her mid-50s, but she looks older. Her diabetes is severe. She has heart disease now. Two of her teeth are dangerously infected. Our teeth impact our hearts, we now know. Bertha has no dental insurance. The doctors say she needs this surgery right away because of the danger to her heart. It will cost $8,000. Jerry's trying to come up with the money. For years, he had a good union job, but those jobs ended. Now he works for UPS handling packages. I don't know what UPS pays him in California, but i know what it pays here. $8,50 per hour to the package handlers. Jerrry's in his late 50s. My son in his 20s worked there for a while; he said it was grueling work. Jerry's back is getting worse. I think of how Jerry and Bertha seemed to be doing pretty well when they were younger. I used to go over their house when their five kids were little. Those kids were so close in age. Jerry and Bertha always seemed like such easy-going, affectionate parents who took good care of their kids. They laughed with them, played with them, disciplined them, but kindly. But forces so much bigger than them took over their kids' lives as those kids grew up. April, the oldest, has always been thought of by the family as the "good girl." Now in her 30s, she lives with her parents, worked until recently being laid off, and helps pay the bills. Jerry Jr has been in prison for some years now ("drugs" is the only reason I hear). Iliana won't speak to her parents. She has mental problems and blames them. Manuel lived there until recently. He struggles financially. Boy, their "baby," killed himself in the spring of 2011 in front of his father. Jerry, one of the hardest working, nicest guys I know, can't understand how to fend off his crushing depression or these external forces that attack him and his family. Bertha still jokes; she's strong. But she's falling apart. How did this happen to them?
Dolores tells me that a dental surgeon says he'll do it if Jerry can come up with $1700 and make payments on the $8,000. I tell her that I think the Affordable Care Act is supposed to make it so Bertha can get this insurance. Their income is low. But we're not sure about the details. And she needs the surgery soon. I say, why can't a bunch of us pitch in $100 each? She says most of them don't have it. But come on, I think. There are so many of us. Surely we can come up with $1700. I keep thinking about this and it eats at my conscience. I call her back and say, what if I call Jerry and just loan him the $1700? No, she says. Wait to see if he can get it. I say, but what if something happens to Bertha? No, she says. Just wait. I say, let me know what's going on with her. What are our moral responsibilities when we can come up with the money if we have to, and someone else may die if they can't get hold of a certain sum?
It's late now. Almost midnight. Tomorrow I go to teach the last class of the first college class I've ever taught. I told the students I'd bring the Nerf football. (It's been a running joke with us -- all those avid sports players telling me to find a way to use sports in our class and me saying I have the ball but they have to think of what to do with it. I have said, don't you think it would be weird to be talking about a powerful, serious passage in a text as we throw the ball around? They laughed.) I am trying to understand how to weave all these realities together. So are many of my students.
No comments :
Post a Comment