Romney Piles on With an Ounce of Hopelessness

All the gaffes come down to Mitt being needy, striving for something, but not having any real grasp about how real people live. They say he is having trouble connecting with people.  I am reminded of the damaging images of Bush ’41, photo’d at the grocery, marveling at the scanning technology that almost everyone alive had seen at all kinds of stores by that time.  Much was made of how Ole ’41 loved his pork rinds. But when you send your man-servant  to buy them, and have no real concept of even the kinds of stores that they might be bought in, well, you might as well stick with the truffle oil and caviar.

It rings just as false as the baseball hat loyalty s*** on which Hillary tripped repeatedly. While Clinton was mindlessly pandering to parochial sports fandom, Mitt, like Bush before him, is striving for something more, something that transcends even sports in our sports crazed country: Acceptance by the common man.  They all want to be perceived as real. Clinton did it with the Sax… and the donuts. Reagan and W chopped wood on their ranches until the hollowness of the images sickened me. Some people can’t even fake it. Romney wants to be seen as real, but is so far removed with his vast fortune and eons past being a salaried employee 15% tax bracket.

Real people do not bet $10,000 to prove a point. Most people even those who have had the responsibility-- and certainly anyone with a real heart-- get no joy from firing people. Not even the guy that was a total a-hole and deserved it. Romney did not say "Fuck the poor" he said he doesn't worry about them. I guess I would have to say that I personally don't "worry" about them either.  It implies an awake-at-night thought process, that honestly I don't have. That being said I can say I am acutely aware of the distressful numbers.  45 million live below the poverty level, which is defined as $22,500 for a family of four. If anyone can explain how a family of four live on that, I would love to hear. It concerns me, even I would say disgusts me, to know that those with extreme wealth in this country can’t be bothered to care. That to me is the crime of what Romney said. He said he’s not worried, but what came across is “I don’t care”. He seems not to know poor people, or certainly really nothing about the circumstances of their lives, and so perhaps it is hard to care. Ignorance is a powerful drug.

I remember so many years ago, I mentored a kid who lived in the projects on W 62^nd St in a two bedroom apartment with his mother, brother, and two sisters. Oftentimes, the mother had a boyfriend who might stay there which meant six people in two bedrooms. In the summer there was no AC and the third floor on which the family lived was brutally hot. Wintertime seemed to veer between excessive heat, and extreme chill. For some reason the heat was never properly regulated. The lobbies and elevators smelled of urine. I do not believe that hunger was primary issue, there seemed enough to eat, but dollars were stretched with wholly unhealthful food, few fruits and vegetables, lots of fried and processed items. To the extent that better food was economically viable, healthful food knowledge was limited. The groceries and bodegas that served the community were notoriously dirty and overpriced.

When crack came, it captured every ounce of the hopelessness that permeated the projects there on 62^nd Street and elsewhere. My friend had already lost one male role model of a sort to gun violence, and when crack arrived violence was everywhere. So many of the young people whose shadows drifted across the b-ball park’s brick walls in the late summer afternoons were lost in the blink of an eye.  For a while my friend was one of them. Sneaking into an abandoned house-- what would have seemed aimless teenage hijinks in Streamwood, the town in which I grew up-- was met with police force and a night in the tombs, the aptly named and notorious Manhattan Detention Center. That arrest for my friend’s brother meant the first mark on what for so many became endless police records.  Anger quickly gave way to frustration and a sense that there was no way out. For many that was true.  

I know it took an extraordinary effort on the part of my friend to make his break for South Carolina, warmer climes, a yard and all that, and some semblance of a life with his lady and his kids. He did not rise above poverty, or maybe just barely, but he rose above the hopelessness of 62^nd street. His mother I hear still occupies her apartment in the projects. All of his siblings were lost to drugs. He has had to turn his back on each of them.

“Worrying” about poor people is such an abstract thought. I think about my friend all the time, and his siblings, and what has been lost. Poverty in America is different than other places in the world. I do believe that many people go to bed hungry in America, but people do not starve to death for the most part of lack of food. I gather that was Romney’s point. In the rare air in which he breathes there are standards for society after which you can turn your head and your heart to other things. In Romney’s mind those standards have been met, or nearly so. But when I think of the poor, I know so much has been lost, and really for all of my life I have often thought of how little anyone cares. That goes for both parties.  Poor people don’t vote in great numbers and of course contribute little monetarily to the candidates.

Our economy now churns out millionaires and billionaires like a pez dispenser. The NY Times reports that hundreds perhaps thousands of people will see their wealth rise to millionaire status as a result of the Facebook IPO. Some millionaires will soon change the “M” to a “B”. Bless them, they were in the right place at the right time, and some of them I am sure are pretty smart. But I have to ask where in us as a society or a people do we find it acceptable to accept 45 million people without health insurance, partially, though not completely, overlapping with about the same number living below the poverty line.  Santorum said a few days ago that people die because of bad decisions about their health, not a lack of health insurance. We all know that’s not true. We have all seen the stories, at least anecdotally. We all know the truth of it. Some people make decisions daily between food and heat, or rent and medicine.  It seems like some of us buy the claptrap that suggests that somehow poverty does not hurt or barely exists for no other reason than the mere thought that to admit the truth is to encourage some agent of the government to take more of what we ain’t got. We pit the poor against those in the middle, meanwhile the wealth of the mighty grows in multiples.

No, I can’t really say I am worried, but I if I were being honest I would have to say my soul is bruised by the depravation we all know, that exists all around us. Sometimes when I go to bed at night I worry about that. Romney, alas, can’t be bothered.