| |
Chapter 19
|
| |
|
|
|
This man sits hunched up all day staring blankly at those who
once gave him so much hope, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. His wife is lying in bed - sick and debilitated from hunger.
|
| |
|
|
|
She can't afford special
diabetic food as they only receive $72 a month. They are lonesome and forsaken,
forgotten by society in a world of emptiness only interrupted by the cheerless
dripping of rain through the ceiling.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The most pernicious of poverty's diseases
is, without a doubt, apathy, the state of mind into which millions of people
are thrown when they realize they cannot hold their own in a world of the
upward climbing optimism of the wolf-philosophy - and therefore give up the
struggle.
|
| |
|
|
| |
The needy in the United States are a minority and see the contrasts
of affluence everywhere they look. As a result, the solidarity and pride often
characterizing rural communities in the Third World are absent, so that poverty
becomes more cruel and much more destructive psychologically than in any other
place in the world. |
| |
|
|
| |
In America you are constantly told that it is your own
fault if you are poor, and thus you fall into a state of violent self-hatred -
a morbid state I find unequalled anywhere else in the world.
|
| |
|
|
| |
That state of mind
helps to kill love in society, the invisible threads of mutual interdependence
and trust which ought to flow between people in a wholesome society. The
destruction of love sows an increasing distrust and fear. Although fear seems
to direct everyone in such a society it is first and foremost the poor it
paralyzes.
|
| |
|
|
| |
One of the things I find most difficult getting used to in America is this
ubiquitous fear - and its resulting reactions. Not only the primitive fear of
other people, but more frightingly the institutionalized fear of old age,
sickness and insecurity, which seem to darken the adult lives of most people
and makes them think and act in ways you feel are totally irrational and
self-defeating when you yourself have been shaped by a "cradle-to-grave"
welfare security.
|
| |
|
|
| |
White supremacy is one of the resulting distress patterns in the victims of
such fear. This in turn has made blacks fear whites such as this woman who
first fled me:
|
| |
|
|
| |
- Are you scared of whites around here?
- Man, see, I don't mess up with whites no kind of way.
|
| |
|
|
| |
- What is wrong with
the whites?
- Them whites, they mess you up, man. They make you lose your home, make you
lose your man, make you lose your husband if you got one. They make you do
everything that ain't right... I am talking about these around here...
|
| |
|
|
| |
-What is
you?
- I am not southern white... |
| |
|
| |