CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

Monday, February 20, 2012

this entry brought to you by wilco, "art of almost"


I'm an atheist, so I don't think the Bible should be held up in much regard. I'm not saying it has no worth; there are some very insightful passages in it. But I also think most ancient texts that have managed to stay translated throughout time still have insightful texts. I think The Illiad still has fascinating parts, and has insights into modern life despite being a few thousand years old. The same goes with all the Greek myths. And hell, even Sun Tzu's The Art of War has things you could apply to your every day life. Of course, it doesn't make sense to base your life off of any of these texts, because if you read them front to back they are astoundingly weird. And the Bible should be treated as such: an ancient book that still has things that apply today that's filled with astoundingly weird and frightening things that not only shouldn't be taken literally, cannot be taken literally.

Still. "Judge not lest you be judged." It really is an awesome, powerful phrase.

My mom was an art teacher, and she taught in the poorest part of El Paso, TX. I'm not trying to imply that El Paso is somehow poorer than the poorest parts of the country, but we're still talking extremely poor. El Paso is a very old city directly on the border or Mexico, and South Central El Paso is 99% very poor Mexicans. This is because the river is literally a few miles from the school; I used to look into Mexico as my mom drove to work. Fifty years ago, the school my mom taught at was the Mexican school, and this is the area of town the Mexicans used to be segregated to. This was the very definition of the modern use of the word "ghetto".

My mom made house calls. When a student was failing in her art class, she would go to their house and talk to their parents. Often she'd have to get Carlos or Jose to translate much to their chagrin, or sometimes she'd get their little brother or sister to. She'd say not only is your student failing art, but art is an elective, so they're probably also failing other classes. And, on more than one occasion, she brought me along.

At this point in time I was probably in the sixth or seventh grade. I think what mom was doing was trying to teach me how I should appreciate the things that I have. And while I did get that message, that's not really what I brought home with me. At this point in time I did already appreciate the things that I had. While it's never a bad thing to keep a child's ego in check, I think I actually learned something much more important.

The afternoon had turned to evening by this point, and we'd made five or six house calls in some of the most frightening and derelict homes I'd ever seen. For the record, some of the houses weren't that bad, and that was almost more surprising. I'd seen homes that didn't appear to be more than the width of a walk in closet, so it was disconcerting when I'd see a home with, like, a lawn. This particular house was obviously a mansion from around the 1850s, and each of the rooms had been turned into an apartment. I've seen this kind of thing since then, but they have always been for singles and young people. Here in this neighborhood every single room appeared to be filled with families. Once you got in the apartment they weren't prohibitively small, but I noticed that you would have to share a bathroom with your neighbor.

As we went from home to home I kept seeing it: people that were grossly poorer than me, but they would still have things like TVs larger than you would think they would have. Not giant, but big enough. 32 inches in some cases. 36 inches perhaps. You'd see Nike shoes. Adidas. And of course, Nintendos. I'd seen them at several of the other homes, but in this particular apartment, a place where they didn't even have their own bathrooms and had to share it with their neighborhood, the Nintendo really struck me.

I didn't have a Nintendo, but it wasn't jealousy that was bothering me about it. I just couldn't understand how a person so poor they couldn't even afford to live in a home with its own bathroom could have a Nintendo.

On the way home I voiced this to her. How in the world is it that they can live in these homes in gang neighborhoods, in places where the front door is locked but you could just kick it in if you wanted to, how could these people have a Nintendo?

"People still want to be people," my mom told me.

No, perhaps they couldn't afford whatever food they wanted every night of the week like I essentially could. No, perhaps they weren't living in an apartment where they had their own bathroom. But your child is still going to see things and want things, to be a normal child like all the other children. And besides, I shouldn't just see a Nintendo and automatically assume it was brand new when they bought it, or that they bought it on the first day. They could have gotten it second hand. It could even be a present from an Aunt or an Uncle that is better off. It could be a lot of things. But the point is, when your child is growing up and they see things that make them feel like a normal kid, sometimes you tell them no, you can't afford it. And sometimes you stretch and make things work out and you get them that thing. After all, I didn't have a Nintendo, I didn't wear Nikes. But there were still things that I had that my mom couldn't necessarily easily afford, but she got them anyway. Sometimes people just want to be people.

Sometimes you hear people, and this is especially frustrating when it's a poor person, complaining about poorer people "taking advantage of the system." Sometimes, they say, you'll watch them buying expensive birthday cakes with food stamps. Or they'll have two shopping carts, one full of groceries that they're paying for with food stamps, and one filled with liquor that they're paying for with cash. Or perhaps someone at work refuses to work more hours because if they do, they'll lose their food stamps.

When someone like this is your sister or cousin, you can go right ahead and judge them, because they're your family. You're the only one that can. But when you just encounter someone for a fleeting moment, or hell, even if you work with them, even if they are instantly the most annoying people you've ever met in that moment you're with them, you don't know their exact circumstances. And even if you say, well, you used to be on welfare, you used to live in a bad neighborhood, and you didn't do wasteful things like that, you didn't game the system, you still don't know their exact circumstances. Maybe that 80 dollar cake they're buying for their daughter's fifth birthday is a complete waste of tax payer money and they could've shopped better, but maybe seeing their kid during their birthday makes them happy. And maybe they live in a neighborhood where their neighbor's teenage son just got murdered in a gang-related shooting has them stressed out, and who can blame a person for wanting the little joys when they live like that? Maybe that person complaining about their hours at work being raised really could afford to go off food stamps, but maybe they don't want to because it would mean they get to spend less time with their children. Maybe you'd make that trade off, but without knowing every single aspect of their life intimately, how can you judge them?

Judge not lest ye be judged.

The thing is, all of us, and I do mean all of us, can be judged by someone else in a better circumstance. Maybe you bought that second TV for your bedroom because you really like watching TV in your bed, but you'd be lying if you said that money couldn't have been better spent, even if you really could afford it. Maybe you got that second car saying that your wife needed it to get to work, but really, spending the money on insurance and gas for a second car was an idiotic idea, when you really could have just worked it out so that one of you picks up and drops off the other. Sure, it's more of a hassle, but it would've been much more economically sound. You did it for convenience.

Myself, I live in a house that is probably too expensive for my means. There are months where the stress of money is so outrageous I have a hard time thinking of anything else. I get stomach aches. But you know what? I used to live in a cheaper apartment complex that looked really nice. But somehow, people's cars and apartments were getting broken into every single week. Despite the fact that it was nowhere near a college, it somehow turned into a party apartment complex where there would be eight or nine 20 year olds living in one apartment, having parties. Here, the neighborhood is quiet, genuinely as safe as any American neighborhood can be said to be safe, I can leave my doors unlocked and not worry about anything being stolen, and you know what's most important? I live within three minutes walking distance of a very nice school, where my daughter is excelling. Things are tough for me, financially. I can't even afford a car right now, and public transportation in this city is awful. But it's all worth it for me, because of that fact right there. I don't care what someone thinks when they see that I don't have a car and yet I live in this neighborhood. I want the safety for my kids, I want to know my kid has teachers that care about her and tell me when things are going wrong immediately, where they're involved, and where, for fuck's sakes, art and music are actually being taught.

But even if you're a millionaire and you drive fancy cars and live in huge houses, there's someone slightly richer who pinches every penny and says "Why do you need a Lamborghini? Why do you live in that huge house? You're just wasting your money. You should be investing."

All of us do things that, from someone else's perspective, are stupid. All of us live off of government money, regardless of whether we think we do or not. We get that extra thousand dollars per child during tax season and we don't invest it by buying our children's future, we blow our tax refunds on bigger TVs and more comfy couches. Somehow we get more money on our tax returns than we put in just because we have kids, money that just came from nowhere, and we're outraged if that money isn't there. Or earned income tax credits. Or credit for being a home owner. Or whatever the hell else. And yes, a lot of us pay bills with our income tax refunds. But when we're done, we blow the rest on a trip to Disneyland.

Let me emphasize that I don't think any of this is wrong. We're all people, and we still want to be people, regardless of our situation. It's entirely easy to see a person at the grocery store talking loudly on their expensive smart phone as they pay for junk food with food stamps and think that they're a scumbag, just taking advantage of welfare, wasting our tax payer money, that this person shouldn't be allowed to coast through life on freebies, that they don't appreciate the things they have, and there's a chance that all those things you're thinking are right. There's also a chance that when someone sees you making stupid financial decisions, all the things they're thinking are right, too.

Judge not lest ye be judged.
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with love from CRS @ 1:09 PM 

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