Ah, the Tea Party

I'm all for public protest. I think there should be more of it. This is America, after all! People have the right to express their opinions. How else can the people send their message to the government in a mostly non election year?

I have questions about the tea party people, though. I wonder who they are. I wonder where they grew up, who their parents are, what their parents do/did for a living, where did they go to school, did they go to college, what did they earn degrees in, what was their first job?

I wonder if any of them grew up in foster care, wards of the state. I wonder if any of them suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. I wonder if their elderly parents receive Medicaid. Did they get Pell grants, if they attended college? Did either of their parents ever lose their jobs or have to file for bankruptcy or have their homes foreclosed on?

I ask because I have this idea in my head about who these people are. I wonder how far off my idea of them is.

In high school, I joined the speech and debate team, not truly understanding what all that would entail. One year, we went to a regional competition. I needed clothing for this, I needed money for my share of the hotel room, and I needed money for food while we were away.

Thanks to my granny's Sears charge card, I got the suit I needed. My drama coach pulled money from some fund the school had to pay for the rest of my expenses. Away I went to the big city!

At the hotel, I was preparing a bath. One of my roommates mockingly (to my memory) suggested that my mother should have warned me not to bathe in a hotel, but to shower instead. I asked her what made her think my mom had ever stayed in a hotel to know to tell me that. She thought everyone took vacations and stayed in hotels. I explained that there were times we didn't know where our next meal would come from; we didn't think much about taking vacations. Vacations were for wealthy people. So were dental appointments and doctor's visits.

My parents were and still are very hard working people. Neither graduated from high school (though my mother earned her GED in her early 40's). But the reality is that I grew up rather poor. I avoided pregnancy and jail and made it out of that. By the grace of God and some ill informed yet lucky choices...and some tax dollars.

I think the tea party people would say my parents had no business having children, especially since they couldn't afford them. I think that's a fair statement. But once they did, I'm glad there were programs like Head Start, Food Stamps, the county Health Department, public schools, and buses. I'm glad there was a slush fund at my public school that could be used to pay my expenses to a regional competition and open the door to a whole new world for kids like me. I'm thankful there are Pell grants and subsidized student loans when I got out of the U.S. Army after four years and went to college. I'm thankful the Veteran's Administration is around and gave me a job for eight years, six of which I spent in evening classes. I'm grateful for the county Job and Family Services department that employed me for eight years, allowing me to give back some of the kindness, encouragement, and hope I have received along the way.

Without the interventions I benefited from throughout my early life, I'd probably be just another poor person in Eastern Kentucky. I may have had little to offer society as a whole. I might have turned to a life of crime and ended up costing tax payers plenty for absolutely no return. Or abused my poorly planned for children or been plagued with some expensive illness.

Instead, I've more than paid back what I received. I've contributed to moving countless families to self sufficiency. I've advocated for the disabled and the severely mentally ill. I've been a steward of the tax payer's dollars. I've been instrumental in saving the government money through my abilities to gather, analyze, and report on how funds have been spent and making recommendations on where the funds might be saved or better spent.

My ideas about who the tea party people are do not include people like me. They include people with very different realities, very different families, and very different knowledge about what people can do with a little encouragement and assistance. I'd have rather grown up as I did than to be able to ignore these kinds of realities.

The tea party people might think they would be okay with letting the poor starve or let the uninsured die, let banks and car companies fail. But there are high costs associated with those decisions. Higher crime, entire industries (social services, colleges, and countless others) shut out. Pure capitalism is intriguing in theory. But there are so many things that people need and want to have an acceptable quality of life that just aren't profitable.

I'd like to see some demographic information about the tea party people. I'd like to hear their ideas on how to improve our current situation. I'm hoping I'm missing some important element about who these people are and that they really have thought about things like what should happen to people like me.

On Choosing to be a Waitress

This post is really just to give people something to think about.

Now, I've been called a liberal, like it's a bad word. I'm okay with that. I'm sorry that people are so polarized in their stances that they villainize the other side. But calling me a liberal is like calling me white bread or cracker or crazy white bitch. I just fail to be insulted because I am not ashamed of who I am.

So, there's some information for you. You're reading the blog of a stinkin' liberal, tree hugging, left wing...err...whatever else "they" call "us".

Now on to my story. Long ago, there was a group of my coworkers that would go out to lunch together now and then. Our favorite spot was a Mexican restaurant just up the street. They had great food and good service, which is important when you're going to lunch from work.

One woman in our group simply refused to leave a tip. Ever. I asked her once why she felt it was okay to not leave the waitress a tip. Her feeling was that she'd paid for her food and she wasn't obligated to supplement the woman's income. I asked if she understood that the waitress made $2.00 or so per hour. She responded that it wasn't her fault that our waitress chose to be a waitress.

Before the waitresses of the world descend upon me, let me say that I am very thankful for wait people. I've been a waitress. It can be a very tough job and expectations from your patrons, your boss, and the cook are very, very high. You have my utmost respect and I will always leave you at least a decent tip, even if you didn't meet my expectations. This is because I understand that much of your ability to perform your job well depends a great deal on things beyond your control.

So now that the waitresses of the world understand where I am coming from, I'll tell you what I told my coworker right before I told her I wasn't going to any more lunches with her.

I don't know anyone who dreamed as a child of being a waitress. Oh, we PLAYED waitress and it was fun! But we didn't dream of spending 8 to 12 mostly thankless hours mostly on our feet, running our asses off for two bucks and change an hour. We didn't study Flo on Alice, trying to pick up hints on the best way to tell patrons that the prime rib was sold out and still score that big tip. We didn't imagine our hands red and chapped, lifting 50 pound bags of milk, making elebenty billion pots of coffee, or hung over old men swatting on our asses as we passed by with a platter of pancakes.

Here's the deal, people. Not everyone makes it through high school, let alone college. Not everyone was encouraged, let alone expected, to get decent grades and get into a good school. Some of us got very little information about the possibility of college. Some of us were discouraged from thinking we'd be good enough for post secondary education. Some of us were told there was no money for such extravagances as additional education that we wouldn't need anyway because we were going to get married and have babies and support our husbands by keeping a clean house.

Among those who grew up in even the middle class, not just the upper class, there seems to be some confusion about how poor people got to be poor. That somehow, poor people really choose to be poor or they are just too lazy to do anything to change their situation. There is some belief that everyone has the same opportunities as everyone else. There's some idea out there that if you just work hard enough, you can be anything you want. And I think that is bullshit. I think until you are out in the world without a safety net, you will continue to buy into that bullshit - and I think it's because it helps you maintain the illusion that YOU could never be truly poor.

Not everyone has the money, the support, or the options that YOU have had. Some of us have had no safety net. We ARE the safety net. There are no parents with some money tucked away for emergencies for some of us. There's no house to take out a loan against. There's no savings account to send us to college or pay for our glitzy wedding or make the down payment on our first house. There's no credit line, hell, no credit! to cosign a loan.

Every now and then, one of us low lives born to poor people escapes. Sometimes it's because of extraordinary intelligence, a teacher or mentor who saw beyond our stringy hair and hand me down clothes, a fortunate mistake, or some other crazy glitch in the system. We get out of the grip of poverty - we finish high school, we manage to NOT get pregnant, we zig when others might have zagged, and we find ourselves with money left at the end of the month. And we stare at that bank balance in AWE!

But not everyone has that miraculous misstep that leads them out of their parents' fate. There's a reason why everyone doesn't hold a college degree. There's a reason some people are janitors, cooks, truck drivers, pharmacy technicians, mechanics, book binders, paper makers, golf caddies, hot dog vendors, soldiers, and waitresses.

And it may not be because they are fulfilling a life long dream. It may be that they didn't have the encouragement or the support others seem to take for granted and pretend we're all entitled to.

Be generous with your time and money and be stingy with your judgments and preconceived notions. And tip your waitress!!