Faces Of Pain, Faces Of Hope
Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
October 10th, 2017
Above Photo: Mr. Fish
ANDERSON, Ind.-It was close to midnight, and I was sitting at a small
campfire with Sybilla and Josh Medlin in back of an old warehouse in an
impoverished section of the city. The Medlins paid $20,000 for the
warehouse. It came with three lots. They use the lots for gardens. The
produce they grow is shared with neighbors and the local homeless shelter.
There are three people living in the warehouse, which the Medlins converted
into living quarters. That number has been as high as 10.
"It was a house of hospitality," said Josh, 33, who like his wife came out
of the Catholic Worker Movement. "We were welcoming people who needed a
place to stay, to help them get back on their feet. Or perhaps longer. That
kind of didn't work out as well as we had hoped. We weren't really prepared
to deal with some of the needs that people had. And perhaps not the skills.
We were taken advantage of. We weren't really helping them. We didn't have
the resources to help them."
"For the Catholic Workers, the ratio of community members to people they're
helping is a lot different than what we had here," Sybilla, 27, said. "We
were in for a shock. At the time there were just three community members.
Sometimes we had four or five homeless guests here. It got kind of chaotic.
Mostly mental illness. A lot of addiction, of course. We don't know how to
deal with hard drugs in our home. It got pretty crazy."
Two or three nights a month people gather, often around a fire, in back of
the warehouse, known as Burdock House.
"The burdock is seen as a worthless, noxious weed," Josh said. "But it has a
lot of edible and medicinal value. A lot of the people we come into contact
with are also not valued by our society. The burdock plant colonizes places
that are abandoned. We are doing the same thing with our house."
Those who come for events bring food for a potluck dinner or chip in five
dollars each. Bands play, poets read and there is an open mic. Here they
affirm what we all must affirm-those talents, passions, feelings, thoughts
and creativity that make us complete human beings. Here people are
celebrated not for their jobs or status but for their contributions to
others. And in associations like this one, unseen and unheralded, lies hope.
"We are an intentional community," said Josh. "This means we are a group of
people who have chosen to live together to repurpose an old building, to
offer to a neighborhood and a city a place to express its creative gifts.
This is an alternative model to a culture that focuses on accumulating as
much money as possible and on an economic structure based on competition and
taking advantage of others. We value manual labor. We value nonviolence as a
tactic for resistance. We value simplicity. We believe people are not
commodities. We share what we have. We are not about accumulating for
ourselves. These values help us to become whole people."
The message of the consumer society, pumped out over flat screen
televisions, computers and smartphones, to those trapped at the bottom of
society is loud and unrelenting: You are a failure. Popular culture
celebrates those who wallow in power, wealth and self-obsession and
perpetuates the lie that if you work hard and are clever you too can become
a "success," perhaps landing on "American Idol" or "Shark Tank." You too can
invent Facebook. You too can become a sports or Hollywood icon. You too can
rise to be a titan. The vast disparity between the glittering world that
people watch and the bleak world they inhabit creates a collective
schizophrenia that manifests itself in our diseases of despair-suicides,
addictions, mass shootings, hate crimes and depression. Our oppressors have
skillfully acculturated us to blame ourselves for our oppression.
Hope means walking away from the illusion that you will be the next Bill
Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian. It means rejecting the lust for
public adulation and popular validation. It means turning away from the
maniacal creation of a persona, an activity that defines presence on social
media. It means searching for something else-a life of meaning, purpose and,
ultimately, dignity.
The bottomless narcissism and hunger of consumer culture cause our darkest
and most depraved pathologies. It is not by building pathetic, tiny
monuments to ourselves that we become autonomous and free human beings; it
is through acts of self-sacrifice, by recovering a sense of humility, by
affirming the sanctity of others and thereby the sanctity of ourselves.
Those who fight against the sicknesses, whether squatting in old warehouses,
camped out at Zuccotti Park or Standing Rock or locked in prisons, have
discovered that life is measured by infinitesimal and often unseen acts of
solidarity and kindness. These acts of kindness, like the nearly invisible
strands of a spider's web, slowly spin outward to connect our atomized and
alienated souls to the souls of others. The good, as Daniel Berrigan told
me, draws to it the good. This belief-held although we may never see
empirical proof-is profoundly transformative. But know this: When these acts
are carried out on behalf of the oppressed and the demonized, when
compassion defines the core of our lives, when we understand that justice is
a manifestation of this solidarity, even love, we are marginalized and
condemned by the authoritarian or totalitarian state.
Those who resist effectively will not negate the coming economic decline,
the mounting political dysfunction, the collapse of empire, the ecological
disasters from climate change, and the many other bitter struggles that lie
ahead. Rather, they draw from their acts of kindness the strength and
courage to endure. And it will be from their relationships-ones formed the
way all genuine relationships form, face to face rather than
electronically-that radical organizations will be created to resist.
Sybilla, whose father was an electrician and who is the oldest of six, did
not go to college. Josh was temporarily suspended from Earlham College in
Richmond, Ind., for throwing a pie at William Kristol as the right-wing
commentator was speaking on campus in 2005. Josh never went back to college.
Earlham, he said, like most colleges, is a place "where intellectualism
takes precedence over truth."
"When I was in high school I was really into the punk rock community,"
Sybilla said. "Through that I discovered anarchism."
"Emma Goldman?" I asked.
"Yeah, mostly that brand of anarchism," she said. "Not like I'm going to
break car windows for fun."
She was attracted to the communal aspect of anarchism. It fit with the
values of her parents, who she said "are very anti-authoritarian" and "who
always taught me to think for myself." She read a book by an anonymous
author who lived outside the capitalist system for a couple of years. "That
really set me on that direction even though he is a lot more extreme," she
said, "only eating things from the garbage. Train hopping. As a teenager, I
thought, 'Wow! The adventure. All the possible ways you could live an
alternative lifestyle that's not harmful to others and isn't boring.' "
When she was 18 she left Anderson and moved to Los Angeles to join the
Catholic Worker Movement.
"I [too] became pretty immersed in the anarchist scene," Josh said. "I'm
also a Christian. The Catholic Worker Movement is the most well known
example of how to put those ideas in practice. Also, I really didn't want
anything to do with money."
"A lot of my friends in high school, despite being a part of the punk rock
community, went into the military," Sybilla said. "Or they're still doing
exactly what they were doing in high school."
The couple live in the most depressed neighborhood of Anderson, one where
squatters inhabit abandoned buildings, drug use is common, the crime rate is
high, houses are neglected and weeds choke abandoned lots and yards. The
police often never appear when someone from this part of the city dials 911.
When the police do appear they are usually hostile.
"If you're walking down the street and you see a cop car, it doesn't make
you feel safe," Josh said.
"A lot of people view them [police] as serving the rich," Sybilla said.
"They're not serving us."
"Poor people are a tool for the government to make money with small drug
charges," she added. "A lot of our peers are in jail or have been in jail
for drugs. People are depressed. Lack of opportunity. Frustration with a job
that's boring. Also, no matter how hard you want to work, you just barely
scrape by. One of our neighbors who is over here quite a bit, he had a
70-hour-a-week job. Constant overtime. And he still lives in this
neighborhood in a really small one-bedroom apartment. I think Anderson has
really bad self-esteem. A lot of young people, a lot of people my age I know
are working for $9, $10 an hour. Moving from job to job every six months.
Basically, enough money to buy alcohol, cigarettes and pay the rent."
"My mom's generation grew up thinking they were going to have a solid job,"
she said. "That they were just going to be able to start a job and have a
good livelihood. And that's not the case. Just because you want to work
really hard it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make it."
"I work as a cashier at the local Christian college," she said. "It's a
small school with 2,000 students. I work in the cafeteria. The contract
changed. The school stopped doing its own food service many years ago. Has
been hiring private companies. After I worked there for a year the contract
was up. It was a new company and they're huge. . I think it's the biggest
food service company. They do most hospitals, schools, prisons. And the job
conditions changed so dramatically. Our orientation with this new company,
they had this HR guy come. He's like, 'You're going to work for the biggest
company in the world. You should be so excited to be a part of our team.
We're going to make you great. Anderson used to be this really powerful city
full of industry. The employees demanded so much from the companies. And
[the companies] all left.' "
"We're just looking at him," she said. "Why is this relevant? Basically the
message was, 'You guys have no other choice. So you don't choose to work
with us. You have to. And we're going to do what we want you to do.' At the
time I was taking $7.50 an hour. They hired me at $7.50 from the old
company. They hired the people beside me for $8, which I was not happy with.
The old employees were making more money because they got consistent raises
throughout the years. They would have them do jobs like carrying crates of
heavy food up the stairs. Or they moved them to the dish room. Jobs that
they knew they physically couldn't do, in hopes that they would quit. I
think. They didn't want to pay that higher wage. And the students weren't
happy either. So many employees were really upset. Everyone was talking
about quitting. We lost about half the workforce. There were 100 employees
when they came in. They had reduced down to 50. That makes my job twice as
hard. But I still make $7.50. With no hope for a raise anytime soon."
"I went up to them," she continued. "I said, 'I need to make as much as
these people at least. I've been here for a year. I'm a more valuable
employee.' And they were like, 'If you don't like it, quit. Maybe you can
get a job at Burger King.' I was so angry. How dare they tell me to quit. I
started talking to some of my co-workers to see if they were interested in
making the job better rather than quitting. And a lot of them were.
Especially the people who'd been there for years and years and who were
familiar with GM and UAW [the United Automobile Workers union]. And weren't
scared of it. So we started having meetings. I think the campaign took two
years. And we successfully organized. It's been a huge improvement. Even
though it's still a low-paying job, everything is set. They can't change
their mind about when we get raises. They can't change their mind about what
the hiring rate is. They can't take these elderly people and make them start
carrying boxes rather than run a cash register. They were also firing people
for no reason. That doesn't happen anymore. . The employees have a voice
now. If we don't like something, when our contract is up for renegotiation
we can change it."
"The jobs we have are boring," she said. "My job was so boring. Having this
as an outlet, also with the challenge of creating the union there, I was
able to not feel so useless."
Sybilla also publishes The Heartland Underground. The zine, which sells for
$2 a copy and comes out every four or five months, reviews local bands like
the punk group Hell's Orphans, publishes poets and writers and has articles
on subjects such as dumpster diving.
In a review of Hell's Orphans, which has written songs such as "Too Drunk to
Fuck" and "Underage Donk," the reviewer and the band sit in a basement
drinking until one of the band members, Max, says, "Feel free to take
anything we say out of context. Like, you can even just piece together
individual words or phrases." (Donk, as the article explains, is "a slang
term for a very round, attractive, ghetto booty and is a derivative of the
term Badonkadonk.") The review reads:
Hell's Orphans has really played some unusual shows like a high school open
house, a show in a garage where the audience was only four adults, four
kids, a dog and a chicken, and out of the Game Exchange a buy/sell/trade
video game store. They've also played under some uncomfortable circumstances
like a flooded basement in which Nigel was getting shocked by the mic and
guitar every few seconds and at the Hollywood Birdhouse one night when Max
and Nigel were both so paranoid on some crazy pot that they were also too
frozen to perform and couldn't look at the audience. For such a young band
that has done zero touring they've had a lot of adventures and experiences.
A poet who went by the name Timotheous Endeavor wrote in a poem titled "The
Monkey Song":
please just let me assume
that there is room for us and our lives
somewhere between your lies
and the red tape that confines
please just let me assume
we're all monkeys
we're trained to self alienate
but it's not our fates
i was walking down the road
i wonder if there's anywhere around here
that i am truly welcome
spend my dollar move along
past all of the closed doors
In one edition of The Heartland Underground there was this untitled entry:
They pay me just to stay out of thier [sic] world. They don't want me at
work I would just get in their way. They pay me just to sit at home. I feel
things harder and see with such different eyes it's easier for everyone if I
just stay at home, if I just stay out of their world and wait to die. I am
not inept. I just don't fit into their neatly paved grids, their machines
and systems.
There is no place for a schizophrenic in this world and there is no place
for anything wild, crooked, or untamed anymore. When did things go so wrong?
Everything is wrong!! They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. They
paved the entire fucking planet. I'm on a mission to liberate myself from
all the lies that poison me and rot inside my mind, holding me captive and
causing me to hate myself and the world. I'm ready to stop hating! I'm ready
to become fully human and join life.
The truth is: We're all drowning.
They think I'm crazy? At least I can see that I'm drowning. No one else is
in a panic because they can't see or feel how wrong everything is. I don't
want to drown. I want to swim and climb up to a high place. I want to rise
above.
Arbitrary Aardvark wrote an article called "I was a Guinea Pig for Big
Pharma," about earning money by taking part in medical experiments. He would
stay in a lab for about two weeks and take "medicine, usually a pill, and
they take your blood a lot. You might be pissing in a jug or getting hooked
up to an EKG machine or whatever the study design calls for, and they take
your blood pressure and temperature pretty often." He made between $2,000
and $5,000 depending on how long the study lasted. Most of his fellow "lab
rats" were "just out of jail or rehab." In one study he had a bullet-tipped
plastic tube inserted down his nose into his intestines. "It was the most
painful thing I've been through in my adult life." He said he and the other
subjects did not like reporting side effects because they were "worried that
they'll be sent home without a full paycheck, or banned from future
studies." He admitted this probably affected the viability of the studies.
He became ill during one of the experiments. The pharmaceutical company
refused to pay him, blaming his illness on a pre-existing condition. He
wrote:
I signed up for one that was going to pay $5,000, but a week into it my
liver enzymes were all wrong, and they took me out of the study but kept me
at the site, because I was very sick. It turned out I'd come down with mono
just before going into the study. And then I got shingles, not fun. .
I'd spent 3 years trying to be a lawyer and failed. I'd worked in a
warehouse, as the Dalai lama's nephew's headwaiter, as a courier and a temp.
Lost money day trading and then in real estate. I was ready to try medical
experiments again. I tried 3 times to get in at Eli Lilly but never did.
Lilly no longer does its own clinical trials after a girl . killed herself
during an anti-depressant study. .
Jared Lynch wrote an essay titled "Sometimes the Voices in Your Head are
Angry Ghosts" that included these lines:
Death shrouded the whole spacetime of the latter half of high school,
coating it in an extra vicious layer of depression. The first night we
stayed in the house I sat in the living room, writing about ghosts in a
composition book. I had a package of single edge blades in the back of my
top desk drawer and sometimes I flirted too closely with that edge of
darkness. I thought a lot about the blades at school. My daydreams were
consumed by untold suicides, and countless times I came home to find one of
my past selves in the tub with his forearm opened wide and grinning with his
life essence surrounding him in the tub on the wrong side of his skin.
It was a strange, beautiful time. Melancholia wrapped around the edges with
the golden glow of nostalgia for a time that felt like I had died before it
existed. I fell into an expected, but incredibly deep pool of depression and
I found the single edge razors that one of my future had so graciously left
behind in my top drawer. I bled myself because I wanted to be with the
lovely, lonely ghosts. I bled myself more than I ever had, but I didn't
bleed enough to capture myself in the barbs of the whirlpool of my
depression.
He ended the essay with "I still bear my scars."
Tyler Ambrose wrote a passage called "Factory Blues."
What is a factory? What is a factory? A factory is a building of varied
size. Some immense tributes to humanistic insatiability, others homely,
almost comfortable. Mom and Pop type places, each run-down corner lot a
puzzle piece in a greater maze. Gears if you will, all part of the
capitalism machine. Some so small they fall out like dandruff, plummeting
into the furnaces that keep the monster thriving. Constantly shaking loose
another drop of fuel from its decaying hide. For the more fuel it consumes,
the drier and deader does its skin become. Until one day, when all the skin
has fallen into the fires, and all that remains are rustic factory bones,
the beast will fall, and all the peoples of the earth will feel its tumble.
And all will fall beside it, when its decaying stench kills the sun.
The cri de coeur of this lost generation, orphans of global capitalism,
rises up from deindustrialized cities across the nation. These Americans
struggle, cast aside by a society that refuses to honor their intelligence,
creativity and passion, that cares nothing for their hopes and dreams, that
sees them as cogs, menial wage slaves who will do the drudgery that plagues
the working poor in postindustrial America.
Parker Pickett, 24, who works at Lowe's, is a poet and a musician. He
frequently reads his work at Burdock House. He read me a few of his poems.
One was called "This is a poem with no Words." These were the concluding
lines.
out of, the affection I receive from concrete whether broken or spray
painted, the old men want that money now want that control even
though they are sad and delusional, if I could I would die from the beauty
of her eyes as they shudder and gasp and relax with natural imperfections
which
I hold in high regards, the glow of the city around me reaches to the night
sky, a slate of black chalkboard I wipe off the stars with my thumb one
by one, songs end stories end lives end, but the idea of some grand, silly
truth to everyone and everything with never die, we are born in love with
precious life, and with that truth I will giggle and smile until I'm laid to
rest in my
sweet, sweet grave.
I sat on a picnic table next to Justin Benjamin. He cradled his guitar, one
of his tuning pegs held in place by locking pliers. The fire was dying down.
Justin, 22, calls himself WD Benjamin, the "WD" being short for "well
dressed." He wore a white shirt, a loosely knotted tie and a suit coat. He
had long, frizzy hair parted in the middle that fell into his face. His
father was a steelworker. His mother ran a day care center and later was an
insurance agent.
"Kids would talk about wanting something better or leaving," he said. "Yet
they weren't doing steps to take it. You saw they were going to spend their
whole lives here begrudgingly. They would talk stuff. They would never do
anything about it. It was all just talk."
He paused.
"Substance [abuse] ruined a lot of lives around here," he said.
He estimates that by age 14 most kids in Anderson realize they are trapped.
"We had seen our parents or other people or other families not go anywhere,"
he said. "This business went under. Pizzerias, paint stores, they all go
under. About that time in my life, as much as I was enthralled with seeing
cars rushing past and all these tall buildings, we all saw, well, what was
the point if none of us are happy or our parents are always worrying about
something. Just not seeing any kind of progression. There had to be
something more."
"I've had friends die," he said. "I had a friend named Josh. We'd say, 'He
Whitney Houston-ed before Whitney Houston.' He pilled out and died in a
bathtub. It happened a month before Whitney Houston died. So that was a
weird thing for me. Everyone is going to remember Whitney Houston but no one
will remember Josh. At the time he was 16."
"I see friends who are taking very minimal jobs and never thinking anywhere
beyond that," he said. "I know they're going to be there forever. I don't
despise them or hold anything against them. I understand. You have to make
your cut to dig out some kind of a living. . I've done manual labor. I've
done medical, partial. Food service. I've done sales. Currently I'm working
on a small album. Other than that, I play for money. I sell a lot of odds
and ends. I've been doing that for years. Apparently I have a knack for
collecting things and they're of use for somebody. Just paying my way with
food and entertainment for somebody. I live right across from the library.
Eleventh Street. I can't remember the address. I'm staying with some people.
I try to bring them something nice, or make dinner, or play songs. I do make
enough to pay my share of utilities. I wouldn't feel right otherwise."
He is saved, he said, by the blues-Son House, Robert Johnson, all the old
greats.
"My finger got caught in a Coke bottle trying to emulate his style of slide
guitar," he said of House. "I asked my dad to help me please get it out.
There was just something about people being downtrodden their whole lives. I
used to not understand the plight of the black community. I used to think
why can't they just work harder. I was raised by a father who was very
adamant about capitalism. Then one day my sister-in-law told me, 'Well,
Justin, you just don't understand generational poverty. Please understand.'
People were told they were free yet they have all these problems, all these
worries. . It's the natural voice. You listen to Lead Belly's 'Bourgeois
Blues,' it's a way of expressing their culture. And their culture is sad.
'Death Don't Have No Mercy' talks about the great equalizer of death. It
didn't matter if you're black or white, death will come for you."
He bent over his guitar and played Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil
Blues."
Early this morning
When you knocked upon my door
Early this morning, oooo
When you knocked upon my door
And I said hello Satan
I believe it's time to go
"I've seen a lot of GM people, they just live in this despair," he said of
the thousands of people in the city who lost their jobs when the General
Motors plants closed and moved to Mexico. "They're still afraid. I don't
know what they're afraid of. It's just the generation they came out of. I
worked with plenty of GM people who were older and having to work for their
dollars begrudgingly. They're like, 'I was made promises.' "
"I was born 3 pounds," he said. "I was not destined for this world. Somehow
I came out. I did the best I could. That's all I've done. I'll never say I'm
good at anything. At least I have the ability to think, speak and act. Three
pounds to this now. I just can't see the use of not fighting. You always
have to think about what's going to lay down in the future. What's going to
happen when the factories close down? Are you going to support your fellow
co-workers? Are you going to say, 'No, things will come back?' Are you going
to cast everything to damnation? Cast your neighbors down, say it was their
fault the jobs are gone."
"I've never seen the heights of it," he said of capitalism. "But I've seen
the bottom. I've seen kids down here naked running around. I've seen parents
turn on each other and kids have to suffer for that. Or neighbors. I'd just
hear yelling all night. It's matters of money. It's always the kids that
suffer. I always try to think from their perspective. When it comes down to
kids, they feel defeated. When you grow up in a household where there's
nothing but violence and squabbling and grabbing at straws, then you're
going to grow up to be like that. You're going to keep doing those minimum
jobs. You're fighting yourself. You're fighting a system you can't beat."
"I've seen poets, phenomenal guitarists, vocalists, percussionists, people
who have tricks of the trade, jugglers, yo-yo players, jokesters," he went
on. "I admire those people. They might go on to get a different job. They
might find a sweetheart. They might settle down. They have that thing that
got them to some point where they could feel comfortable. They didn't have
to work the job that told them, 'So what if you leave? You don't matter.' I
know a fellow who works at the downtown courthouse. Smart as can be. One of
my favorite people. We talk about Nietzsche and Kafka in a basement for
hours. The guy never really let the world get him down. Even though he's
grown up in some rough situations."
And then he talked about his newborn niece.
"I wrote this in about 10 minutes," he said. "I race down the street because
no one else was available. I went to a friend. I said, 'I wrote a song! I
think it's neat. I don't think it's good. But I like the idea.' I'd never
done that."
He hunched back over his guitar and began to play his "Newborn Ballad."
You were brushed and crafted carefully
They knew young love and now they know you
How two lives figure into one beats me
But either I'm sure they'll agree with you
Your eyes will open proud I pray
May the breakneck sides around you come down
Little darling I'll be your laughing stock
So the mean old world won't get you down
I ain't gonna say I ain't crazy
All are fronting and pestering your soul
When we first meet I can promise to
To listen, to play with, to talk to, to love
There's nothing no better they'll tell you
Than your youth, no weight will end
No matter the preference child hear me
Not a moment you'll have will be absent
My pardon, my dearest apologies
For the scenes and the faces I make
For now you might find them quite funny
But they'll get old as will I, I'm afraid
Your comforts they don't come easy
With an hour twenty down the road
We made lives in telling you sweetly
But you can make it, we love you, you know.