Jeff Dietrich embodies the vow
of poverty. Since the early 1970s, he
has been the driving force of the Catholic Worker organization here in Los
Angeles. His work follows in the
tradition of Catholic Worker founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Currently, he and his band of volunteers live
in a communal house with homeless and terminally ill invited guests while
running the Catholic Worker Hospitality Kitchen on Skid Row and participating
in protests against a variety of sociological and political sins of the city,
state, and country. He publishes a
newspaper, The Catholic Agitator, and
serves as both editor and columnist. His
recent book, Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’Skid Row (Tsehai/Marymount Institute Press, 2011) collects forty years of The Catholic Agitator columns, letters,
and journal entries composed by Dietrich.
His book is equal parts memoir,
political analysis, and scriptural teaching documenting Dietrich’s practice of poverty. He explodes the conservative label of
“culture of poverty” and that the poor are to blame for their situation, while
clearly outlining how current social thinking and the global economy further
victimize the poor and the destitute. He
addresses the role of alcohol and drugs in the dire circumstances of the poor,
and he dares to attack his own Catholic Church for its political ambitions and
for its disregard for the poor in building a multi-million dollar
cathedral. The Los Angeles political
establishment, the mainstream media outlets, and the police department all
suffer under Dietrich’s relentless attack.
In his introduction, Dietrich
draws connections between Christian faith and the narrative art. His are biblical stories, specifically the
gospels from which the Catholic Worker takes its mission. A true Christian, he writes, must be “willing
to risk everything: our comfort, our
security, even our very lives,” for these stories.
Dietrich believes that poverty
brings with it the need for humility and includes the process of stripping down
a person to his essence, leaving him vulnerable and exposed. This mirrors the lives of those who live and
sleep on the streets of the city who become victims of law enforcement,
criminals, purveyors of drugs and alcohol, and the “thousand natural shocks
that flesh is heir to,” as Shakespeare famously called them. It also means incarceration, court
appearances, and putting oneself in harm’s way.
The goal is to change society, change the system, and change
people. “Change does not come from the
barrel of a gun,” he writes, “or the decrees of the legislature. It comes out of the suffering and sacrifice.” Living in solidarity with the poor is
necessary, because, “It’s not often that people in our culture have the
opportunity to immerse themselves totally in an experience,” he says. “In fact, our way of life is designed
specifically to prevent us from having…an authentic experience.”
If the book is strong on
history, the gospel teachings, the current sociological and political impact of
poverty (and it is), the question must be asked how practice has led to
change. The problem is that the poor
have always been with us, as we have heard from the gospels, and this is the
case with the testimony of Dietrich’s writing.
For forty years, he has lived with, fed, and observed the poor on Skid
Row. Things have not changed much. The denizens of that fifty square block hell
still line up for food and care every day.
The change has happened within Dietrich and his fellow workers. They have deepened, reasserted, and
reaffirmed their commitment to living with the poor. The practice did not change the world, but it
did change people. This one-to-one
transformation must occur first before the world can follow. Yes, the poor will always be with us, but the
need to eliminate institutionalized poverty must be secondary to changing
individuals. This is why one chooses to
live with, and serve the poor.
Jeff Dietrich has practiced, and
continues to practice poverty. But how
many people can permanently leave their lives behind to take on Dietrich’s
level of commitment? Catholic social
teaching, Christianity, indeed, many religions teach that a lived experience of
poverty is necessary. There is a
scriptural component where Jesus teaches this practice, harkening back to the
Old Testament Deuteronomists, the priestly tradition of Leviticus, and the
prophetic literature. Concern for the
other, the widow, the orphan and the alien, is embedded in the creation
story. “God created man in his image; in
the divine image he created him; male and female he created them” (Gn.
1:27). But could there be a secular
approach to living with the poor? Is
there a way to understand and practice solidarity with the poor without making
the transformation Dietrich details in his book?
Two secular writers attempt to
tell the story of the poor through the practice of a kind of short term poverty. Dietrich believes “storytelling is the
essential human activity.” Therefore,
these journalists’ books fulfill the need to get the story out of what it means
to be poor. The writers went out into the
world and lived with the poor. Of
course, to write about their experiences, they also chose to leave their
poverty experiment, a choice few truly impoverished people have.
In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)Getting By in America (Henry Holt and Company, 2001), Barbara Ehrenreich gives
up her home, her family, and her financial security to travel the country and
work for minimum wage to see if, with available housing and resources, she
could sustain her life. She set up rules
for herself. First, she could not use
her writing skills or reveal her Ph.D. in biology. Second, she had to take the highest paying
job offered and keep it as long as possible.
Third, she would take the cheapest housing she found. Is this poverty? As the subtitle reveals, it most definitely
is. However, she writes, “there was no
way I was going to ‘experience poverty’ or find out how it really feels to be a
long-term low-wage worker. My aim here
was much more straightforward and objective—just to see whether I could match
income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.”
What follows is a desperate story,
one that plays out daily for millions of Americans. Ehrenreich discovers that poverty offers
incredibly high levels of frustration.
People do not return calls, housing is nearly impossible to find on a
minimum wage budget, and an injury can derail the whole structure of one’s
life.
In Florida, she files more than
twenty applications without an interview.
With no job, she struggles to find housing. Almost immediately, she loses self-esteem and
self-confidence. She discovers that no
one can survive on six to ten dollars an hour.
“There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary,
there are a host of special costs,” she writes.
Some costs are monetary; others are physical and mental. Workers are often stretched thin and forced,
under penalty of termination, to produce more, leading to “management stress.” The experience leaves her traumatized.
Job applicants are given
batteries of tests that try to confuse them into admitting some moral, ethical
or legal weakness. Meal breaks bear
witness to why the poor in America are often obese: fast food, chips, and junk food are all
consumed instead of healthy meals.
Healthy food costs more, and the cheaper alternatives offer a chance to
stretch the dollar. Often, the work is
extremely physical—house cleaning, polishing, lifting, vacuuming, scrubbing—and
the calories are inadequate to support such heavy manual labor leading to a
variety of health problems. Workers are
exposed to harsh chemicals and cleaning solvents. The pregnant workers clearly suffer the most
in Ehrenreich’s story, along with those already afflicted with disease and
injury. All are told to work through
their pain, including a woman who suffers a severely sprained ankle while on
the job.
In one moment of desperation,
Ehrenreich attempts to get help from a variety of community service
organizations. These food banks and
assistance centers are open only during the middle of the work day and often
only on certain days of the week. I
found this to be true in my own research.
“What is this assumption that the hungry are free all day to drive
around visiting ‘community action centers’ and charitable agencies?” Ehrenreich
writes.
Ehrenreich comes to some very
potent conclusions in her book. “Work is
supposed to save you from being an ‘outcast,’” she tells us. “But what we do is an outcast’s work,
invisible and even disgusting. Janitors,
cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the
untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society.” And these outcasts work in jobs, and in
circumstances and conditions that breed illness, injury and crippling
stress. One of her fellow workers did
not realize she had cancer until a tumor the size of a quarter pushed through
the right nipple of her breast. Pain,
torn muscles, hacking coughs—without decent medical care and affordable drugs,
the poor workers must simply push through and keep going. Many use alcohol and drugs to quell the pain,
but this also causes problems during random drug screening. Alcohol, which does not show up in test
results, is safe, but this encourages alcoholism and is apparent in other ways,
such as in absenteeism, tardiness, and quality of work. The stress also leads to spousal abuse and
domestic violence. Ehrenreich points out
that even to get a job is costly. The
candidate must travel to submit the application, return for the interview, go
to the prescribed clinic for drug screening, and often endure the embarrassment
of having the lab technician stand in the bathroom while the applicant urinates
to verify that the sample is from the person applying for the position.
Women especially suffer in low
wage jobs. Child care is expensive, so
often they must arrange their work day so they can pick up children. They are more susceptible to spousal violence
and inappropriate advances in the work place.
Safety and security issues become frightening realities for poor women.
For both men and women,
Ehrenreich finds low wage work repetitive, monotonous, back-breaking and
mind-numbing, fueled by a high sodium, high fat diet that further damages mind
and body, and relieved only by alcohol or drugs. “What you don’t necessarily realize when you
start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your
life,” Ehrenreich writes. In the end,
she finds she cannot sustain herself on a minimum wage job anywhere in
America. With two minimum wage jobs,
both nearly full time, she has successful periods, but the physical toll makes
this work nearly impossible to sustain.
“What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace,”
Ehrenreich writes, “was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s
basic civil rights and…self-respect.”
William T. Vollmann takes a
unique approach while living in poverty to capture the misery and suffering of
those less fortunate. He does this with
all the various subjects he’s addressed in his nonfiction. He wrote a seven volume study of violence, an
examination of the hobo life of train-hopping transients in America, and
various articles in a variety of magazines and journals. His novel, Europe Central (Viking, 2005) won the National Book Award. He is the quintessential gonzo journalist,
who lives his stories while reporting them, and for previous work on
prostitution, he paid women for the chance to interview them and smoked crack
cocaine in order not to blow his cover while researching drugs in America. Always compelling, it still must be noted
that his work often erases the boundary between third person, objective
journalism and the stories and people being profiled, which can be incredibly
dangerous.
For his book, Poor People (Harper Perennial, 2007),
Vollmann travels the world living with those in the most backbreaking,
soul-crushing, abject poverty. He walks
the streets and bangs on the doors of Russian mobsters, prostitutes, drug dealers
and addicts. He brings with him
financial resources in order to pay people for their time and try to leave
their lives a little better than he found them.
He winds up purchasing women and girls from human traffickers, smuggling
them across borders and setting them up in schools and communities where they
would be safe and have the opportunity for a better life.
He opens the book by saying,
“This essay about poor people was written in a different spirit—neither to
explicate poverty according to some system, nor to erect a companion movement
to Das Kapital in the cemetery of
hollowed-out thoughts.” He, instead,
wishes to write the nonfiction Grapes of Wrath, the great Dust Bowl novel by John Steinbeck. He does not want to practice Jeff Dietrich’s
brand of evangelical poverty, but to tell the story of poor people. Again, we have the emphasis on story, the
great tool of human enlightenment.
He asks each subject a basic
question: why are you poor? Variations or follow-up questions included,
why are poor people poor? Are men and
women equally poor? Can you change your
destiny? Do the rich have an obligation
to the poor? His subjects are surprisingly
candid, and in the end, their responses break your heart.
There is the former
prostitute-turned-house cleaner in Thailand, Sunee, who struggles to support
the youngest of her eight children who is smart and loves school. Sunee is an alcoholic. She tells Vollman that her own mother is her
only lifeline. “She’s always told me,
Sunee, you try to be strong because I am here and I’ll never throw you away.” Having been abandoned by her father and two
husbands, this reassurance means the world to her. When asked what can be done to help poor
people, Sunee tells Vollmann to give the poor lots of money, a jaded and crass
answer.
There are the Russians, Oksana
and the epileptic Natalie, who live in the literal and figurative shadow of
Chernobyl. Many in their family suffer
blood diseases, cancers, and unexplained and unidentified illnesses. Vollmann asks Oksana why some people are poor
and other are rich? “Because there is no
justice in the world,” she replies.
“It’s the order of things; God must permit it.”
Vollmann jumps back and forth
between his subjects, lingering for a chapter and swirling back later to pick
up the narrative threads. He breaks down
the phenomena of poverty into categories:
invisibility, deformity, unwantedness, dependence, accident-prone-ness,
pain, numbness, and estrangement. Within
these categories, among these characters and their stories, he laces in
wisdom. He quotes Montaigne, who said
that fear of becoming poor causes greater anguish than actually being
poor. This is reflected in those who say
that even against all evidence to the contrary, they are not poor. If the poor have
nothing, they cannot fear losing everything; conversely, those of us who have
things fear the day when all is lost. Montaigne writes that “poverty has nothing to
be feared but this, that it delivers us into the hands of pain, by the thirst,
hunger, cold, heat and sleepless nights that it makes us endure.”
A disciple of American
philosopher and Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau responds to Vollmann’s
now typical question of why are some poor and some rich: “I think the love of money has a lot to do
with it…I think a lot of people are poor because they want to be poor.” He goes on to say that poverty is a state of
mind, especially in America. If only it
were that simple.
One of the more earthy answers
comes from an elderly Japanese man on a bicycle in an impoverished fishing
village. Why are some people rich and
others poor? “Because some have jobs and
some don’t.” Ehrenreich would
disagree. In her view, job or no job,
one can still be desperately, hopelessly poor.
On a final point, Vollmann
includes pictures of his subjects taken with their permission. They are worth as much as the words because
we can clearly see the poverty in their eyes and circumstances. They are horrible and beautiful, frightening
and illuminating. He captures one
subject in a vacant lot that has been turned into a homeless camp. In the background of the shot is the open and
overflowing communal toilet. The picture
speaks clearly of the humanitarian crisis of poverty.
Upon reflection, it is amazing
how even though the journalists took a secular approach to their subjects, religion
runs like a thread through the fabric of their nightmares. One would expect a deep vein of Catholic
social teaching in Jeff Dietrich’s book, but Ehrenreich and Vollmann, as well
as their subjects, also utilize religious ideas and imagery to express the
scourge of poverty.
Ehrenreich attends a local
prayer meeting in her worker disguise.
The preacher celebrates the sacrifice made by Jesus, his death and
resurrection, and Ehrenreich questions why no one brings up the Sermon on the
Mount from Matthew’s gospel. “Jesus
makes his appearance here only as a corpse,” she concludes. Later, she thinks of Jesus’ words that the
last shall be first while scrubbing and buffing a fabulously wealthy man’s
home. She remembers reading that Simone
Weil “once worked in a factory for some metaphysical purpose” she never
completely understood. Mistakenly, she
thinks that as poor people are not on television, religion, too “seems to have
little to say about the plight of the poor.”
In Vollmann’s book, the thread
of faith in the stories of the poor turns ghostly and haunting. One subject, Sunee, believes as Jesus died
for humans, she would die for her daughter.
Another subject, a Buddhist, believes people who are wealthy were rich
in a previous life. A Muslim he
interviews believes Allah gives each person, including the poor, something
special which reminds me again of Genesis where all men and women are created
in God’s image and likeness. I
remembered too that the Koran requires that the wealth be spread through “Az-Zakab” or “poor-due.” Vollmann alludes to this text as well. When he asks his standard question of the
Muslim, the man answers: “It is not for
us to answer this question. Allah gives
and He takes.” Finally, a Russian woman is
asked by Vollmann, “Do you believe in destiny?
I believe in God. Therefore, I
believe in destiny,” she replies.
By far the most heart-rending
quote comes from Vollman’s interview with these same Russian women who have
endured so much suffering. “Do you have
dreams for your future?” he asks. “Hope
dies last,” one of the women replies.
The Russian people who seem to have unlimited capacity to endure
hardship and sorrow, have the final word on dreams in the valley of the shadow
of death: Hope dies last.
Can one completely embrace poverty
by choice? Jeff Dietrich did, and
continues to do so. He is the exception,
and in interviewing him, I’m not sure his anarchist persona is not born out of
ego. He enjoys his position as a rebel
and iconoclast. When complimented on his
grasp of biblical teachings, he was quick to respond: “It doesn’t take much to know what priests
know about the gospels.” He argues that
for one to be present to the reality of suffering in the world without opening
up means to live a life of fear. On this
point, William T. Vollmann agrees. “I do
not wish to experience poverty, for that would require fear and hopelessness,”
writes Vollmann.
What can we learn from poverty,
even temporarily living with the poor as experienced by Ehrenreich and
Vollmann? We can gain an understanding of
what it means to live with gut-wrenching misery. We can know the fear, violence and
hopelessness of the poor. We can
visualize the enormity of the problem of poverty. And we can understand, as Jesus teaches in
the gospels, that the poor will always be with us.
But those who choose poverty
will always be at a remove from the source because the choice to live in
poverty is just that: a choice. We can be in solidarity with the poor. We can work to alleviate their suffering, but
unless we are born into that horrifying world, we can never be truly of that world. And maybe it’s better that way. With a bit of distance and the knowledge that
there is something more, we can inspire those who suffer to find a way out of
their misery. In that way, hope does not
die. Hope lives to light another day.
A companion piece to
this post detailing a day in the life of a soup kitchen on Los Angeles’ Skid
Row will be published this weekend on the blog, On The Street Where I Live: Searching for the Soul of Los Angeles.