Life in Rural America - Part 2
No man is an island
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Mike, whom I met on my Census rounds and for whom I helped secure an appointment with Idaho Legal Aid for assistance with a housing ownership issue. I spoke with him this week on the phone. He had his call with the attorney, yes, and legal aid found his old case and have all his receipts. Other than that, he’s in limbo. He waits for word every day, hoping all will be resolved and he can stop worrying about whether he will be evicted. Until then, I hold my breath as well, hoping that next month when I contact him again, he will have good news.
Meanwhile, let me tell you about a few other folks.
Lucy, who has lived in the same small town her whole life, is the mother of five and grandmother of four. Three of her grandchildren live with her in a single-wide mobile home, though two are moving out this month to attend college. One of her sons lives with his wife in a camper behind her home, pretty much just for sleeping since it has no water hookup. Basically, they’re camping in her yard and using her bathroom and kitchen, while their 16-year-old son lives inside with his grandma. If you lost count, that’s six people using one bathroom in a mobile home.
Lucy has worked at the town’s general store for 30 years. She’s now the manager. The son that lives in the camper works in construction. They can barely make ends meet.
What struck me first after she invited me in was her dog and two puppies in a kennel. I can’t remember the breed now, though they looked something like a King Charles. The mother had eight puppies and only two survived. Lucy said the dog was so grief-stricken after the death of the sixth one that she almost stopped caring for the last two. How did they die? Lucy couldn’t say except that three were still births. Full stop. I want to vomit just writing those words. My heart absolutely breaks for the mother dog.
So, while it would be really nice to keep one of the pups, knowing the mother will be devastated when her remaining two are taken away, Lucy simply can’t afford to. The mother and father are both AKC certified. (which seems odd to me but that’s what she says) The pups can be sold for maybe five hundred each and she really needs that money.
Then there is Terri who works for the post office. She’s from a small town of 500, where she was a county dispatcher for 15 years and her husband was Sheriff. Together, they raised three children, the youngest of which had a complicated birth, resulting in serious health issues for all his thirty years.
After 35 years of marriage, Terry’s husband left her for another woman – a younger woman in her forties who had previously been married eight times. More than that, this was a woman known to everyone in the dispatch office, as they had received no less than 17 calls over time to have her removed from the local bar.
While caught up in his new love, he stopped paying the mortgage and by the time the divorce was final, the home was in foreclosure. Not surprisingly, he lost the next election. But here’s the rub: everyone in the dispatch office knew about the affair and didn’t tell her. Later, it seemed that almost all 500 people in her small town had known, and no one told her. The betrayal cut deep.
In one year, she lost her husband, her job, her 3500 square foot home, her community, and the only life she had ever known.
Now she lives in a 500 ft trailer with her youngest son, the one still struggling with health issues. And she drives 120 miles each day roundtrip for her job, because she can’t afford to live in the town where she works.
Then there’s Maureen. She is a divorced woman in her forties with custody of her two children, 15 and 16 years old. Maureen worked as a massage therapist to put herself through college. Now she has a job at a drug and alcohol recovery center, while still taking a full load of classes to graduate next spring and officially become a social worker.
When her kids went back to high school this week, she learned that her son’s best friend is having problems at home. She was vague about the problem(s) but the bottom line is clear: it’s not safe for him to be there. So Maureen said he could stay with them. “I can’t not offer for him to stay with us, knowing what I do about his situation. Somehow, we’ll make it work.”
It takes a village.
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote the 16th Century preacher and poet John Donne in his Meditation 17:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…
Or, as Kamala Harris’ mother used to say, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
I’m sharing these stories because these are our stories.
This week, Barack Obama described the key ingredient to America being so great is:
“[a]belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief—I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper—that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”
And last night, Kamala Harris said, “A harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.”
I’m fortunate to work in rural Idaho, to meet the people who live here and to hear their stories. Without being preachy (I hope), I just need to say this:
We all need to hear these stories. These stories are the collective story of us. Us as a country. This is where our strength lies, and our healing begins.
Do these stories matter to you? Do you believe in the idea of each man (person) for himself? Or do you believe we are all part of something bigger and that bigger thing makes us responsible to and for each other?
By the way, you know Tim Walz, the career teacher and coach who’s running for VP? His daughter, Hope, is a social worker in a homeless shelter.
Thanks for sharing the stories, Jan. We need to hear these things so we can do something to help.
When I was helping in Paradise, California, after the devastating Camp Fire, we had volunteers checking people’s eligibility for assistance from our project. One volunteer described two families neighbors directed him to who were so devastated and rock bottom emotionally that they weren’t even able to complete an application for assistance, so he took the time to help them get the help they needed.
There are so many in our communities who need advocates to help them move forward. It’s one of my sunset years passions. I have enough stuff and have much experience to share. In fact, today I paid my “child support” payments to two young families who struggle to live in a low wage, high cost area.
It doesn’t take make to bring folks back from the brick, but the rewards for doing so are priceless.
These are stories that break your heart. For me, I think it took running away to live abroad to really understand what it meant for a society to take care of each other. Northern European Socialist Democracies aren’t perfect, but there’s very much the feeling that everyone deserves a life of dignity, and the government is responsible to provide basic human rights like healthcare and housing.
I’ve also seen this on the city level living in Amsterdam. My small neighbourhood got to vote how to spend money specifically set aside to beautify and improve our community. And low-income families get a special card that not only gives them access to free public transport, but also reduced fees for museums and cultural events. Because nurturing the soul is a human right too.
It felt like the slow unclenching of a fist to know that there’s a safety net here to catch me if I fall. And once I felt that, I wanted everyone to feel it, in a way I’d never known was possible before.
My biggest beef with America now is that “taking care of each other” so often means private charity. That’s just never enough, and it relies on the (unreliable) largesse of the giver, as well as giving those who have more the power to decide who “deserves” their help.