I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it a bad sign when I come across not one but two guides on the same day on how to be poor. The first came from The Stranger, one of Seattle’s alternative weeklies; in “The Power of Positive Poverty” (the Stranger’s cover story last week, how depressing is that), writer Hannah Levin goes into great detail on how to have a life in Seattle with an income of about $10,000; it apparently involves trips to food banks and occasional groveling to the electric company to get your bill trimmed. The second comes from London, where writer Peter Tatchell reports that he’s been living adequately, if not lavishly, for the last two decades at under 7000 pounds annually (which, as it happens, also translates to about $10,000 per year). Of these two situations, I would believe it’s probably easier to live poor in London than in Seattle; London’s probably a bit more pricey overall, but England also still has a more comprehensive safety net than the US, so if you really get screwed, you’re probably better off.
No matter how you slice it, however, trying to make a go of it for $10,000 a year still pretty much sucks. Both Levin and Tatchell attempt make a virtue of their position—Tractell notes that the physical exercise required by poverty (no car) has kept him pretty well buffed even at age 50, while Levin touts a potluck congregation with other equally strapped friends as a reasonable social alternative to going out nights and getting trashed (which, I should note, it actually is). But neither of them, thankfully, is under any illusion that being poor is actually a totally positive state of affairs. “Poverty is embarrassing, frustrating, frightening, and depressing,” Levin notes; Tatchell, who self-describes as not especially materialistic, still dreams of living in a nicer place than subsidized housing, but doesn’t hold out much hope for it.
Reading both of these pieces, which are well-written and well-thought out, you can’t help but ask yourself—hey, neither of these two people seem insane, utterly anti-social or entirely lacking in employable skills. So why are they living at or near the poverty line? The answer: Well, they’re writers, of course. Levin makes what incomes she does make as a freelance arts writer. This means she makes diddly; then there’s the fact that she’s an arts writer for alternative weeklies, which takes her down to the “less than diddly” level. In Tatchell’s case, his freelance writing is done to fund his gay activism campaigns, which are clearly the focus of his life, but which don’t make him any money at all.
On the poverty thing, I’m ready to give Tatchell a pass; whether you agree with his brand of activism or not, activism takes a lot of time and effort, and the man’s made the conscious decision to forego a more comfortable life in order to campaign on the issues that are important to him, which is not something everyone’s willing to do. So, good on him—it sucks he’s poor, but he’s making a difference or at least pissing off a bunch of irritating straight people, which on most days can’t be considered a bad thing.
Levin irritates me, however. The only reason she’s poor, as far as I can tell, is that she’s decided being an arts writer is the only thing she should be doing at the moment, and she’s willing to deal with the poverty in order to have that self-affirmation. In a general sense, that’s just fine: If you want to be poor in order to say you’re a writer, instead having to assure the people whose food order you’re taking that you also write, far be it from me to stop you. Go ahead and live off of Top Ramen if you want.
But here’s the thing: Because she’s self-selected to be poor, Levin also seems to assume that it’s okay for her to graze off the food banks or get subsidized housing or apply for state-assisted health insurance. And that, my friends, is a big, steaming pile of crap. Levin’s intelligent, articulate, almost certainly college-educated, and has skills that would allow her to get a job, would she deign to do so. She doesn’t need any of this assistance, and every box of pasta she takes from a food bank, every emergency cut she gets off her electric bill and every handout she takes from charity takes away from people who honestly and legitimately need help. Not everyone has the option of being poor. Some people in this country don’t have much choice in the matter.
Levin and others who are in her position should be ashamed of themselves. First off, writing doesn’t have to be a vow of poverty, and I can speak to that fact directly. Even if writers don’t make money hand over fist, they can make enough to support themselves just fine. Second, if I couldn’t support myself with my writing—and Levin can’t, as evidenced by the fact that she roots for handouts on occasion—I would get another job. I wouldn’t stop being a writer, I would simply be doing something else as well. Certainly there’s enough of a history of writers with day jobs to support that idea. This goes for anyone in any creative field or anyone who has a college degree.
Third, any person who can work enough to stay off the support net should do just that—and in fact they owe it to the people who actually need the support net. This is no joke: Some woman struggling to feed her children is going to wander into a food bank and miss out on something good for her kids because someone like Levin came through and took it first. Short of Levin’s library card, there’s hardly a service she mentions in her article that her using does not entail someone else losing out. I’d like to see her try to explain her “need” to that person.
In her article, Levin talks about having the “privilege” of being able to choose to be poor in order to pursue her goals, but I’d like to suggest to her that her “privilege” stops where someone else’s need begins. What she needs to do is to get a job and start putting back into the support net what she’s so obliviously taken out of it.