A First-Hand Look at Third World America: A Nation of Abject Poverty and Inner-Displaced People

The waters of Katrina did not recede to reveal a landscape ravaged by the uncontrollable forces of nature and give humanity pause with a display of how volatile this planet truly is. No, that hurricane exposed instead a society in chaos from injustices levied by humanity. The media assailed viewers with the faces, stories, and handwritten pleas in tall letters of a people abandoned by their own country. Katrina flooded America's conscience and issues of race and class that had long been ignored rose to the front of our minds like buoys.

In the aftermath of Katrina the media has inundated the American population with the growing number of families living in abject poverty and warnings of the disappearing middle class. Americans are slowly being exposed to more images of their own neighbors living is dire conditions. Gone are the contrived boundaries of tenements and trailer parks that neatly -and erroneously- defined the lines of class. A community, which I often call, "Third World America," exists quite visibly within a society of fabled opportunity and wealth. To see it one need only to let go of the illusions of race and class and open their eyes. I know Third World America first-hand. In that week that followed Katrina my mother called to ask me if I was watching. And then she said, "You know if we lived in New Orleans we would be right there with them."

It was also my mother who told me to never write about my life. "No one will believe it," she said. But, we have a voice; the refugees, the inner-displaced Americans, the impoverished, the untouchables of this society. I have a voice. I wish to use it to share a bit of my story, in the hopes that I may first be heard and then finally seen.

I come from a single-income household. My father rarely paid child support, and it was even rarer that the court enforced the order. My mother was a social worker, but with the wages the state paid her she qualified for the same benefits she was allotting to her clients. I remember sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store and my mother divulged to me she was too embarrassed to use her Electronic Benefits Card. ("Food stamps" are no loner used; benefits are distributed electronically to a plastic card with a magnetic strip.) With all the attitude I possessed as a pre-teen, I boldly grabbed the card and went into the store without her. When I reached the check-out line I produced the Benefits Card and was asked for Identification by the cashier. I explained that I was a child, I didn't have ID. She refused the sale and defeated I went back to the car and told my mother she would have to go in. I still get incensed every time I pay at a store and stare down at the options on that little black box: Credit, Debit, or EBT. First, I curse that cashier for making my mother endure the shame I wanted to shield her from; then, I remember my mother's overwhelming case load with the state and all the second jobs she worked, and I hate that there are still people who believe that the harder you work in America the more you get ahead.

Working all the time to keep her children sheltered, fed, and clothed made it difficult for my mother to actually raise us. At fourteen my brother dropped out of school to pursue his dream of being a Rap Star. He went to New York and had a deal with a label, but it folded and he spent the remainder of his teen years making music and usually living with friends. My eldest brother had left long before that. The boys would come and go, and I was often shipped off to live with relatives or friends -it was rare that we all lived together in my mother's house. Still, we each had a special connection with that house and she fought to keep it as a constant in our unstable lives.

It sat on major highway and when the big trucks passed the floors would shake and the windows would rattle. We didn't have a stove, or a refrigerator. There was no shower; only a bathtub with severe water damage that made the tiles beneath it sag enough to create an imposing dip in the living room ceiling. Despite its disrepair there was only time we left it completely abandoned. It was the winter of a record blizzard. Only my mother and I lived in the house at the time and we ran out of heating fuel. We had space heaters and electric blankets, and could have made it through alright if I had remembered what my mother told me about the bath. One night I forgot to leave the water running after I was finished bathing. The pipes in the house froze and my mother, concerned with doing what was best for me, once again had to give in to the impossibility of our situation and find a way. The next day, when I got home from school, she told me to pack my things and that we were going to stay with my grandparents. After a short time with them we moved again into a Section 8 apartment. The difficulty with Section 8 is that while it may seem affordable for lower-income families, the price you are actually paying is with your pride. The trade off for reduced rent is that you allow strangers to come into your home and routinely inspect it. Privacy is evidently a luxury. When summer returned, so did we. Back to the house, where we collected rain water to flush the toilet and showered at the YMCA until my mother scraped together the money for the plumbing repairs.

As hellish as the condition were, that was my home. While I was constantly uprooted over the years, I knew I could go back to that place. When my mother and father first moved into the house it was surrounded by farm land. As the years passed sub-divisions began to spring up all around us, and more and more commercial real estate signs appeared along the highway that cut through the pastures. Property taxes continued to increase. One day I turned on the six o'clock news and the top story was about a man in the next township over who had shot a deputy delivering a tax sale notice to his house. Later that same year, we got our notice. I was in college by then and as my mother scrambled to find someone to buy the property at a fraction of its value, I worried about my residency. She did eventually find a buyer. After paying the tax debt (and my father claimed his half of the profits from the sale of property he had not maintained, or paid the mortgage or tax on,) my mother was left with almost nothing and moved back in with my grandparents. I had to leave the dorms and get an apartment in Philadelphia to maintain my in-state status. I took a job with a non-profit agency in North Philadelphia; a community over-run with drugs, crime, and poverty -right across the street from the University- and struggling for revitalization. Far from the countryside of my youth I found a familiar plight. With plans for building a Casino in the works the people of that neighborhood are being forced out. Squeezed at both ends, the inner-city and the outlying country, and unable to afford the disappearing middle ground of the suburbs, where are we to go?

I forged out on my own, but was unable to make ends meet. I had to break my lease and leave school. In the past few years I have drifted. We have all drifted. I work hard and strive for independence. There have been set-backs and false starts. It is difficult to file for the financial aid I need to return to school without a permanent address, but I find a way. My mother is easing her parents into the last days of their life, and with no retirement plan or savings her future is unsure. My eldest brother is trying to make his way in California. My other brother, the Rap Star, is still an independent musician -gaining respect, but contending with a collapsing music industry. We have no choice but to move forward, because there is nothing in our past that we may return to.

This is but a small introduction to my story. My experiences as a member of Third World America have shaped my life, my talents, and my ambitions. For someone to live the way that I have in America is often considered deplorable, unjust, or even unbelievable. Unfortunately, it is more common than you may think. Watching the events of Katrina unfold I knew exactly what it was like to live in the conditions of the Superdome and to have no one care. I cried as people, people of my America, were left to die with no dignity. I screamed and cursed at the callous bureaucracy and ignorance I have encountered all my life. And when I heard the mother of our President say, "Many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them," I thought: If Mrs. Bush came face to face with me would she assume I was deserving of or used to the conditions that I grew up in? If she opened her eyes and saw me -before I had a chance to tell her who I was- who would she see? After all, I am a twenty-four year old white woman. The America that is in crisis evidently looks a lot like her twin granddaughters.