Pushing his own wheelchair.
  • CM
  • Pushing his own wheelchair.

The first thing we must understand is that poverty does not naturally exist in this society. Poverty is imposed, and the scarcity of basic services and access to basic needs is artificial. Like an actor on a stage or in a movie, a poor person is a cultural creation. Their situation is one of the strangest in the world. The poor in our country are as real as the visions in our dreams, yet the visions in our dreams, or the actors on our stages and in our movies, do not, like they, live their fiction. All are made from the same stuff, human cultural production, but the poor are condemned to never not play their role, never to wake, never to step down from the stage, never to leave the set.

The other day, a man, who by appearance was poor, walked his wheelchair to the bus stop near where I live in Columbia City, placed his wheelchair between a trash can and the bus shelter, sat in the wheelchair, and smoked a cheap and rather stinky cigarette. When the bus arrived, Route 7, he requested the lift. The driver set the beeping lift machine into motion, and the man, who was not disabled physically, delayed the bus a little. During the trip, other people, who were also not physically handicapped but mentally unwell, delayed the bus even more. By the time we reached Little Saigon, the bus was late, and another 7 was behind us.

A cultural (rather than natural) law: The poorer a neighborhood is, the higher is the number of those with mental problems. Why? One reason is that after being abandoned in the Reagan years ("the de-institutionalization of mental health" in America), these unfortunate and generally unproductive people slid into the streets or pooled in the poor parts of our cities and towns. It is not original to point out that the kind of society we live in offers little support to unproductive people. As a consequence, you will not find many unproductive people in the streets of neighborhoods with highly productive people. Like only likes like. Anyone who takes the Route 7, which services the Rainier Valley (whose median income is $20,000 lower than the city as a whole), and then takes Route 5, which services Northwest Seattle (its median household income is $5,000 higher than the city as a whole), will notice the difference immediately. It's not just a change in color but also a change in the number of riders with obvious mental problems.

The result of all this when put together? People tend to blame the buses and not the system the buses service. Our buses are slow not only because of the traffic generated by cars, but also because they have to absorb the hard and disruptive facts of a public that's poorly funded. And the only solution that society offers to these transportation realities and difficulties are cars, traveling alone, moving without the interruptions of or direct exposure to underfunded public and health systems. But this option creates only more traffic, more jams, and more hatred for democracy. It's indeed a cycle made in hell.