How Did I Get Here?....More Importantly....How Do We Get Out?

Anyone who knows me knows I have a great sense of humor. I had a bumper-sticker that read “Where am I going, and why am I in this basket?” Initially, I thought it was a pretty funny bumper-sticker, but now I am not so sure. Right now, my life feels like it is going to hell in a hand-basket. The worst part is that I don’t feel like I actively sought to make my life spiral out of control and to create the situation I am in. I turned forty this year and I am on the verge of living in my van (until it is repossessed because I cannot make the payments) and being in dire poverty because I cannot find a job due to a growing nationwide economic depression. How can this be? As a single woman with no children, from a middle-class, two-parent family, I have worked very hard mentally & emotionally to create a good life for myself. But external forces beyond my control are another matter. How can I help to change the external situation?

For the last ten years I have been actively working at improving myself. At age 30, I was obese, living with my parents, dysfunctional and unhappy with my life. Immediately after my thirtieth birthday, I started counseling so that I could change my attitude about myself and the world and learn how to handle difficult situations head-on or even how to cope with them without self-medicating (food/alcohol/drugs) until I was able to deal with the situation. I love my former therapist and wish that everyone had one as caring and sincere as mine was (she is a credit to her profession).

I am proud of the work that I have done in therapy and are measurable by the accomplishments I have achieved and the challenges I have overcome in that time. In the last ten years, I have learned to love and respect myself (which is not an easy task but is necessary in being able to love and respect others), be my own & best advocate, learn how to say “no” in a healthy/loving way, learn how to give without expectations, learn to take more risks/challenges in relationships and for personal growth and be more gentle with myself when things go wrong and see where there may be a lesson to learn that the situation.

In the last decade I bought and sold my first house (an ADORABLE one 1/1 cottage for $35,000 and sold it in four years for $90,000), found my life’s passion as a multi-issue activist & re-educated myself about U.S. history from the working people’s point of view & our foreign policy and trade policies (among other things), took an 8-month personal sabbatical to Portland, OR to learn about community building and activism, successfully underwent surgery in Mexico to address my life-long struggle with obesity & bulimia, addressed my poor body image issue by going to a nude beach (and becoming a regular nudist as a result), addressed my life-long fear of men (poor self & body image attracts unhealthy people) and faced it by becoming an escort, opened the first fair-trade shop in my area (living in the back of the shop for two years w/o having suitable housing conditions) to educate consumers, created a peace movement in my hometown and inspired and worked on the peace movement in a nearby city, traveled around the country by myself in my van a couple of times and just recently picked up my life and moved out to Portland, OR to dedicate myself to creating a just and equitable society with the good people in the “City of Roses”.

So, I arrived to Portland on November 6th, with a couple thousand dollars in savings, an affordable shared housing situation lined up, and an enthusiastic attitude about being a part of a very “green & progressive” thinking/acting community. It felt like home being back in Portland after my brief 8-month stint in 2003. In my opinion, there is an energy/feeling that a place can have (houses and towns/cities) and Portland has generated a creative/independent yet communal energy that attracts the activist and spirit in me. Even Emma Goldman, back at the turn of the 20th Century, noted the radical feeling of Portland in her autobiography “Living My Life” which was a ringing endorsement of the city for me.

Job hunting here in Portland, as I have discovered over the past two months, is more daunting than I imagined. In my life, I have never had trouble finding work. I was trained, as far back as high school, in office work and have had more than twenty years of employment in that field. I have worked more than ten years in the restaurant & food industry and owned two businesses (pet sitting and retail shop). For at least ten years of my adult life I have worked two jobs at a time putting in more than sixty hour work weeks.

No one can call me a slacker, unwilling to work or unable to work either for physical, mental or skill disabilities. I do not have a drug addiction, alcohol addiction, gambling addiction nor do I have attitude or personality issues which prevent me from working well with others. The only problem I have is not being able to get hired for one job, much less two. So, how is it that I am less than two weeks from being kicked out of my rented room and living out of my van and needing state support services to provide for me my basic needs: housing, food, medical care, transportation costs & money to pay my van payment and two credit card bills each month?

How is it that an able bodied person with good work skills & positive mental and spiritual outlook on the world and who comes from a solid middle-class family with loving & supportive parents (who are still happily married after more than 40 years) be standing on an economic cliff just waiting to be pushed off? There is something VERY wrong with this picture.

Like I have said already, I am an activist. I am committed to changing the external forces that keep injustice and inequality alive because it is these two conditions that are pushing me and others over a cliff that I did not create nor did I take conscious direct-action to perpetuate. I believe in taking responsibility for my actions (even if they resulted in unknowing harm to others or the environment) and changing my actions to be more humane and less destructive for the future humans and creatures on our planet. Certainly all of us can be activists in this way.

I am willing to take responsibility for changing the destructive economic & social path we, Americans, by working under certain conditions for money or a combination of money (to pay off capitalist debt & my vehicle) and basic needs (housing, food, hygiene, medical/dental care). I want to work for money that comes from creating solutions and alternatives to the system (capitalism) we live under now. It is now very evident that capitalism is a failure by the very fact that taxpayers must bail out banks, major industries like automobile manufacturers and airlines (as we have done for more than 25 years now) and give huge tax breaks and subsidies to multi-national corporations like Unisys, Walt Disney & Boeing. I will work for an organization that is providing resources or help in REAL & CONCRETE ways (like legal services for working/poor/disfranchised people, civil rights protection/expansion or anything revolving around hemp/marijuana/healthcare/feminist/food/environmental issues) or I am willing to work for a local business that is involved in community building in some fashion (this could involve using local suppliers-goods & services, worker-owned/operated collectives) and/or utilizing “green” technology & resources that will both educate and encourage other businesses to get on-board as well as be an example that alternatives to the competitively-destructive capitalist model can work! Otherwise, I will work for free as a volunteer and use the system for which I (as a taxpayer for 25 yrs now) have CLEARLY paid into and deserve to access! I will also take time to do active lobby work to let those in political positions know of my situation and that they must make it a priority to pass legislation that works towards creating an alternative economic society with more cooperation and less competition so that the future for us and beings yet to be born will be one worth living. In my opinion, it isn’t a question of if our economy is going to end, but rather when it will end.

xoxoxoxxo

Emma