Lives of Quiet Desperation.

The more I read about this story, the worse it gets. Every now and then I am shocked out of my world by tales so horrific I must pause for a moment to imagine the situation, the daily routine of lives lived so differently from my own. What terrifies me more than anything is that while this family's outcome was atypical, their conditions were not so rare:

Powe made about $14 an hour at the Residence Inn, general manager David Ragland said. She had worked there since the hotel opened in December 2004. "She was
one of the success stories of the hotel," Ragland said. "At first we didn't know if she'd make it. It's a hard job. She became one of the better housekeepers."
But at home, she was struggling, neighbors and police said. She worked long hours, and complaints about her boys fighting with neighborhood children and throwing trash bags off a balcony were mounting at the property rental office.
She was issued food stamps, but she kept barely any food in her home, the sources said. Her apartment had roaches and few furnishings.

So many people live under these conditions or worse. Assuming a 40 hour work-week, $14 an hour works out to roughly $29K annually. I'm willing to bet benefits weren't exactly the best in the world either. Still, supporting two children on $29K around here is tough. Median income for DC (yeah I know this was PG County, but PG County has more in common with DC than with Washington County) for a family of four recently was $56K (Maryland's was $88K).

Of course, wealthy people kill one another, too. I'm not really discussing the actual murder -- that's an atypical outcome for the masses of Americans living under pathetic economic conditions (often far worse than Ms. Powe's). I'm much more concerned that poverty surrounds us and in fact poverty makes possible much of our lifestyle ("our" meaning the relatively well-educated and well-employed class that runs out to happy hour and dancing, dinner and theatre, the game and a nightcap, the week at the beach, etc.). It can't last and it won't last -- at some point the contradictions will become too stark and too explosive to contain themselves.

And we will have ourselves a "let them eat cake" moment.

Tillie Olsen's 1934 poem "I Want You Women up North to Know" is too long to post in its entirety, but here are some opening and closing stanzas:

"I Want You Women up North to Know"

i want you women up north to know
how those dainty children's dresses you buy
at macy's wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,
are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,
down in San Antonio, "where sunshine spends the winter."

I want you women up north to see
the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
"exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats"
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, cataline,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
in blood, in wasting flesh.

...

Women up north, I want you to know,
I tell you this can't last forever.

I swear it won't.

The excerpt can't do it justice. A full copy can be found on the poetry class blog.