assessing blame

Something washes over me as I go to a downtown credit union to cash my paycheck--guilt. Some whiskey-eyed old black man often stands inside the bus stop, scanning the passersby for willing donors to his pass-time.

Why do I feel guilty? I suppose he has less than me, but I cannot readily judge that other than by what I see, which is an old, black man with a winter coat pulled up such that only an aging smokey face pokes out, accented by bulbous chapped lips that have buffeted many a winds and many a 'no thanks.'

I was preparing myself for such an encounter then a wave of indignation washed over me. "How should I be the shill for this guy's habit?' That among other emotions and their justifying sentences belted out of my mind's mouth. At their core was a "shared" experience with poverty. I place the word in quotes because all is highly subjective--even the state of poverty. And in the politics of signification and the mobilization of words, "poor" and "poverty" have had found themselves lobbed like so many Civil War cannonballs among the indignant and the indigent. And their supporters, that veritable army of social workers, weekend philanthropists, and Sunday apologists, who toss their pie-charts and pathos into the litany of opinions about poverty and how to address it, force a schism in my thoughts about my vacillation of feelings.

Here I stand. Here I drive, edging closer and closer, city block by city block, until I see that familiar navy blue figure standing at the edge of the bus shelter. He is staring at me. I quickly avert my eyes and try to emphasize my own filth from work and the DIY repairs showing on my car. I am but one star in a grand constellation that I'd identify as poverty. But between you and me, I had choices, and therefore I am not yet completely a victim of circumstance. After all, I am white, male, educated, and I work for my older brother at a steel mill.

Hold on a second. Where did I go wrong? Shouldn't I have used that big brain of mine to go into finance so that I could scan markets, create exotic derivatives, sell trading packages, and make and lose lots of money really fast? A job like that requires a lot of communication skills--not only phone calls but face time with potential buyers. I could have been a whale by now, literally swaying markets by my vast and purposive imprint upon them. I could make solar big, or buy up a small web company that specializes in providing a small, yet handy tool for social networking sites.

Hold on a minute. I went to school and after about 2 months all of my doubts drowned out any opinion I had otherwise.  By my second semester I was riding on auto-pilot, and was getting better at it. How strange that is. Then I proposed to throw it all away by going to junior college. That plan was shouted down by lots of 'monied' relatives. And by 'monied' they threw a couple grand, collectively, at my 'indecision.' A lot of good that did me. I still owe a rather stubborn 15 grand in outstanding tuition.

I am digressing from my point. I had chances and choices, the kind that are made available by one's placement within a network that isn't one's design. I was born into a family that had a modest income and the wherewithal to push me toward academics. I did just that, but I saw it as an end in itself. That was my first bad choice. Instead of choosing classes for their intrinsic value to my personal interest and enrichment I should have done what any self-respecting middle statistic male does: go away to school, join a fraternity, and go into a relatively straightforward profession, then use the ties gained via the fraternity to land a first or subsequent lasting job. No, I went commando, solo that is, into higher education only to find myself in my junior year, by course work, without a major and with a serious existential crisis facing me. I had to pick a major. And what did I do? I did what any self-respecting student does; I sought out student career services. The first thing I did was go take a lengthy Myer's-Brigg Type Indicator on the day after I got so drunk that I smashed by car into a telephone pole. That test indicated that, among a slew of potential careers, I was made for urban planning. Aha! My Simcity playing payed off! The career counselor sent me onto the MBA track.

I started out in the business course track, took some computer courses, and fell quickly in love with the early software and internet mark-up language. That was 1997. I was at the threshold of another exploding career track. I jumped out of business into computer science, and landed my first substantive course--Java Programming. The teacher was completely not there. He showed us a Sun Microsystems CEO talk about the web of the future and how we would be basically using computing appliances, not the free-standing cat hair collectors we were using then. And the program we had to run was on CD-ROM. I didn't even have one on my computer at home. When I tried to find time in the computer lab no spaces were available. At the zero hour I went to my cousin's place and fired up the software while he and his buddies played D&D in the other room. I got nowhere and soon found myself dropping the class. "W" showed up on my transcript, and I once again reshuffled my career choices through my degree options.

I settled into Communication Studies. What a vague concept that one was. It worked out. I stayed on the cusp of obsolescence, studying old-world journalism and editing, while scanning photo slides into a digital dark room called a photo shop. The whole thing was laughable. I graduated with a CD showcasing my ability to time the swapping of low-resolution hockey pictures to the tempo of a Sepultura song. Wow. That is all I did. I really had little to show other than that. I had no interest in turning my passing interest in this ability into an occupation. Once again, it was the job that dogged me. Nothing sang to me. Nothing. And so I did what any self-respecting white, male did. I applied to graduate school. That was an easy one. My advisor during my undergraduate education more or less secured a spot for me. Another sure-fire window of opportunity was opened for me, and so I went back to school for a Master's Degree.

I didn't regret a second of my Master's Degree, nor did I regret much of my Doctoral studies. Times got tough, sure. I doubted myself, like no other. But when it came time to finish up, I choked up. And here's where I am now. I was scheduled to graduate in 2006. It is 2012, and I work in a steel mill, ABD. I studied cultural studies, social theory, technology studies, communication theory, and critical theory. Now I apply these skills as I stand in place with a blaze orange and yellow reflective blazer--much like what crossing guards wear--and watch fire. Yes, I watch fire. I watch to make sure that a one-in-a-thousand accident doesn't happen while my co-workers are on break or are leaving for the day. Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer eat your collective Jewish hearts out. Here I am, the dilettante of a million little things with no real, substantive thing to show for my education other than some alienating and obsolete vocabulary.

And who is to blame? I could blame me. I could finish my dissertation and find a fitting job at a university. Damn, I hated my last one. I fucking loathed it. The whole ugly apparatus of higher education showed its milky sac of marketing, its wreaking caudal of efficiency education, its waxy reproductive opening of community, and I worked with the whole rank underside knee-deep in its malodorous smart classroom. Day-in, day-out it was a low point in my life, so low in fact that after I quit my job I basically took to drinking and playing a fantasy video game to avoid the reality that I knew for a whole year. Once again, I had the luck and wisdom of white maledom to save me from standing at the bus shelter in my navy parka staring vaguely, teary eyed at passersby. No that won't do for me., I had money saved up, and so I watched from atop the perch of a 30-beer cube of Busch Lights as the economy went into a second notorious depression. It was nothing but notorious and depressive, for even from the haze of 13-plus beers an evening I saw nothing great about it. And it was hardly recessive, no goddammit, this was its dominant trait.

So in my long journey down a memory trace I have nothing truly substantial to show for my vagabondage other than it shared a similar root to all forms of slavery, be it self-enforced by a routine, other-enforced by an oppressive whip, or simply a consequence of one's Dasein, of one being thrown into a situation well out of one's control. No one blames the child of poverty, the crack baby, the child of alcoholic parents, or the serially molested foster child. Why blame the man at the bus shelter just because he is drunk? Maybe he drinks to cope like so many others?

And so like the serially molested foster child whose ass became a fistula and must shit into a bag at his side, I too am a victim under a milder set of serially abusive situations. And most of these were of my own creation. At the moment that I made meaning of a challenging stimulus I retreated to a depressive state of self-doubt. And so, I ducked in and out of opportunities and only stayed until the water reached so high. This explains why I am currently the fire watch for a small maintenance crew repairing steel beams around a larger power plant inside a steel mill. There, I freeze my ass off, and am quite luckier than the bus shelter black man, for I make 22 dollars and hour, plus some time and a half for waiting after my colleagues have left for that one-in-a-thousand fire to start. Hell, I've never even used a fire extinguisher. Perhaps this life is truly a scam of the highest order. I can either find hope in the scam filled life to grant me a reprieve, or, like the bus shelter black man clad in navy, I can go about slavishly within the bosom of my circumstances and etch out a routine. I will call this range of awareness and opportunity 'reality' and my reaction to it will be 'common sense.' For there, I and the bus shelter black and his navy blue coat and split lips share destinies. Perhaps we share these destinies with countless others of various stations in life. We find within our situation a range of capabilities that come to our awareness by feeling out these surroundings, call it 'life' and judge our actions 'agency' and reflect upon the persistent facts of our life our 'common sense.' And where our lives intersect others we each retreat to some kind of pidgin that both secures our ego-identities while granting us some kind of performative space to either engage the other for money or sneer at them with indignation. I am finding the most common pidgin is to pretend like a person is not even there.

We are all victims of that envelope of awareness of our situation that one may objectively call consciousness. This situation is the fount from which we came; it serves as our context; and our interaction with it forms our sense of agency. Nothing new has been said on this line or on any of the others above, for each word is itself a victim of sense-making. I cannot wrest from these things anything that hasn't been said before, nor can you understand why I write what I write. Even if you fool yourself into thinking such, all you have done is entertained some discourse genre that you've taken to living with as a credo. And even the tidiness with which I call someone's constellation of knowledge and vocabulary for talking about certain things in their world is an illusion that I cannot begin to completely put to some kind of empirical test. And we perch upon the precipice of a multitude of abysses. And their realness is a mirror of our convictions to the words we believe by and the signifying to which we put them.

I am not to blame. That man at the bus shelter is not to blame. This world, in all its buzzing confusion is a vast orchestration of many actions begun before us that will continue after us. We are machinery in this type of world. We don't speak its words, they speak us. Communication is ventriloquy. I am its dummy.