Holy Poverty

i’ve been reading up on st francis of assisi and listening to some anarcho-folk punk in a room five by ten feet, minus a corner for the closet. this summer i’ve been thinking a lot about goods. artifacts. the thought process has been spiraling outwards, demanding more and more of my consideration. poverty is the big thought this summer.this, then, is something like the fruits of my considerations.

FALSE IDOLS
possessions will trick you. they’re snakes like that. tricksy. they promise to fulfill psychological needs, and they don’t. francis held that riches go farther than useless: they actually obstruct you on your way to god. the gospels of course bear out the thought. some familiar quotations:

easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven;
carry no purse, no bag, no sandals;
do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or what you will wear;
don’t lay up treasures;
the first shall be last and the last shall be first;
the son of man has nowhere to lay his head;
blessed are the poor;

and so on. strong words. in short, things will always fail you at the most important level, and woe to them that they fail. as i noted in one of my first posts, portability, my father put it well: by the grace of god, our attachments fail us. be attached to the immediacy of god.

(another reason why hopping freight trains is the perfect metaphor for the realized life: given the physical demands, you can’t take anything with you that you don’t really need, and you probably can’t take even that much. and you can’t get too attached, because they’ll probably break when you throw them off the back of the dragon.)

the buddhists have this down. the four noble truths:

1: life is suffering (or, life is insufficiency)
2: the origin of suffering is desire
3: there is cessation to suffering
4: the path to the cessation of suffering
the eightfold path: elimination of desire and right action

IRONY
being that material equity as a function of justice is among the highest of my values, let’s look at the sharp and slippery irony: why, if riches don’t help you achieve peace, bother with economic justice? if the poor are more blessed than the rich, then why should we do the terrible injustice of fighting poverty? clearly, that way madness lies.

because poverty is ugly. it’s prostitution at age seventeen because you have no other options. it’s losing your eyesight because you’re out of health insurance. it’s having that abortion that the factory manager says you gotta have or you’ll be fired. it’s dying in the superdome.

hardly an ideal worth working towards.

it would be better to call what i’m after anarcho-christian minimalism. that is, a righteous tendency towards elimination of the things that kill your soul. a bourgeois bohemian indulgence? a spiritual priviledge of the upper class? perhaps. i’m not convinced otherwise. francis was rich before he was poor. he also gave alms to the poor. in some cases he gave them considerable sums of money. took away their poverty.

i don’t hold much truck with philosophy or politics that can’t play well with each other. and the implications of the worth or non-worth of material things are obviously political. but i’m trafficking in contradictions here, working towards reconciliation of two fundamental problems: 1: the spiritual problem of the eye of that needle, and 2: the political problem of the uglyness of unjust poverty. righteous poverty in the face of blasphemous poverty.

EVERYTHING FREE IN AMERICA (FOR A SMALL FEE IN AMERICA!)
most of the things i do own were made in the long and unwholesome shadow of colonialism. welcome to america, right? we live in a ridiculous society where basic material consumption implicates you in a web of injustice. a lot of people i know look at he inescapable scale of the unjustice and conclude, tragically, that nothing can be done, engaging themselves in no meaningful activity towards righting the wrong. nor do i pretend to defeat the hopelessness of it.

voluntary poverty offers spite, but no solution: poverty by choice is not necessarily a teneble political solution to the world’s problems. beautiful to live in poverty, just to spite what they’re selling… poverty to what political end? to put the manufacturers out of jobs?

THE ETHICAL WALLET
in this way, it’s like vegetarianism. PETA (people for the ethical treatment of animals), (a group whose premises i basically agree with but cannot fucking stand), preaches ethical vegetarianism as a means of improving treatment of animals - basically amounting to a boycott. such a boycott is totally ineffective: a much more practicable way to impact the meat and dairy markets is to continue buying both, and to try to do so ethically: ergo, i should change my hippy-ass veggie ways and buy humane meat (as i try to do with dairy). but i still can’t stomach the flesh of the dead.
the same double bind applies to consumption of all goods, really: hard to impact a market that you’re not in. which is why i try to buy the clothing i can from places like american apparel, made in the heart of LA, not guam, and making an attempt to deliver a living wage. and hey, starbucks made a pretty big commitment to offering fair trade coffee if you ask for it. a step, a step.

so you buy fair trade when you can. you shop american apparel if you can. maybe you feel better about yourself, and maybe you just wish that you never started to see the patterns of injustice so you could sleep better and wake up with athicker wallet. and anyway you haven’t done much, because ethical consumerism is no kind of adequate way to address the massive problems of free-trade globalization. you try to fight the symptoms but you can’t kill the disease. it’s like trying to starve a dragon to death by sleeping with a virgin. there just has to be systemic and governmental enforcement of justice. your wallet is poor ammunition.

starbuck’s wallet, on the other hand, packs a bigger punch. and okay, i know: their policy on the whole thing is riddled with ridiculous hypocrisy, - and they clearly aren’t doing what they could to revolutionize the market, sure, but just assume for a minute that it weren’t and they were.

got that?

because i’d still probably hate the fuckers.

SHIT-PIMPS
it’s like they belong to a cabal of shit-pimps that seem to be making a concerted effort to bury alive whatever might be left of an american soul. buy, buy, buy, consume, take this, and while you’re at it, buy that, and here are some mints for an extra $1.50, and give us your e-mail so we can sell you more shit that has our logo on it so that your friends will want to but the same shit (and on and on and on and on).

if you don’t watch it you’ll wind up spiritually buried under feces in a way that jesus of nazareth could not possibly have even imagined. FUCK OFF!! would you please just quit promising happiness to terrified fourteen year old girls as a thinly veiled attempt to get them to purchase your shitty plastic product? selling sexism, selling racism. selling anything they can get their fuckin hands on. so with no evacuation, let california fall into the fucking ocean.

it becomes clear to reader now: what disgusts me about the accumulation of shit is a result of the culture that created not only the shit itself but the so-called need for said shit.

one of the main functions of advertising is to create need where none existed before, and this is damaging to people. just ask the binge and purging high-school girls. because to the shitpimps, you are not a person. you’re a consumer. individual people who work for the shitbeast will see you as a person, but never the beast. the minute a corporation loses its inhuman edge, someone else will come in with a hostile takeover to make that extra 1% profit. and that’s good for the economy. and that creates jobs.

and jobs are good, right? i don’t want to be out of a job.

AN INCONVENIENT APOCALYPSE
but the planet can’t keep up with our consumption. capitalism depends on the ever-increasing consumption of resources on a planet with finite resources to offer, which is at its asymptotes simply a non-working concept. effective use of resources coupled to conservation is a must for the continued prosperity of the human race. quality or quantity: it’s a choice we have to make.

which brings us to the big conclusion.

man does not live by bread alone, says the gospel story.
okay.
sure.
but it fucking helps, right?, because
you can’t eat faith.
so there’s a balance.
minimalism yes, famine no.

the world is about to learn, the hard way,
what so many people have had to learn
on an individual level:
things will fail you.
our dependence on the production and consumption
of crap
for profit
will fail us.
and when it does, there will be a global crisis
a long emergency, if you will,
and the planet will have to learn what francis teaches:
enough.

the right hand reaches for god by dropping what was in it,
and the left hand works for justice with the tools it can.