Continuing the discussion on conservatives and poverty, I’m reminded of a TV show, Alaskan Bush People, about the Brown family. This is a bit of reality TV fluff allegedly chronicling the antics of some modern-day homesteaders in Alaska. I actually grew up this way for real, back woods, off the grid, sustenance living. No school, no technology, seldom any neighbors. Needless to say, it is not the adventuresome, idealistic, entertaining lifestyle portrayed on television, even in the best of circumstances. We were never in the best of circumstances.
The real story behind the Alaskan Bush People is Billy Brown’s ingenuity. He comes from a well off family and he’s a writer who figured out how to tap into people’s dreams and idealism, our sense of rugged individualism, and our thirst to go forth and conquer. Freedom! The freedom to provide for yourself, the freedom to conquer your environment, the freedom to enjoy the fruits of your labors. Billy Brown sells frontier dreams, packaged in a TV show.
That is what most of us desire, the ability to provide for ourselves, to create and innovate, to say, “I built that.” Most of us live lives far more like being a hamster on a treadmill, you work for someone else to pay bills so you can work to pay bills, and you can never get ahead, you can never get off that wheel. There is no chance of advancement, no ability to work your way up. Raises, promotions are simply swallowed up by taxes and the increased cost of goods. Any chance for upward mobility is simply a dream passed along to the kids, maybe they can break free, because we sure can’t.
Now, it isn’t like that for everyone, there are still success stories and people living beyond their means, and McMansions, and a whole slew of lifestyles variations, but for the most part that is the working class, hamsters on a wheel to a financial no where, dreaming of freedom.
So what is freedom? It is pretty much the ability to make your way in the world unhindered, to provide for yourself. When you are poor, it is a form of bondage, you do not get to make your way in the world unhindered, there are dozens of stumbling blocks, obstacles and walls in front of you. Some of them are psychological, emotional, but a great deal of them are systemic, they are entwined with bureaucracy, regulations, restrictions.
One thing that I think is a real stumbling block is the way poverty is still perceived as immorality, so being poor must mean you are lazy, stupid, you made bad choices, you deserve it, and if you need help or ask for help, you better show up feeling repentant and ashamed. In the Western world especially there are many false ideas that suggest money, success is somehow related to morality and poverty therefore, is a lack of morality. So often our work with the poor can become more about expressing our own moral superiority and declaring our own virtue, rather than actually helping someone else.
It’s kind of a bummer because one thing that successful people do is ask for help. They create relationships and connections. They recognize that they are not an island, that they are going to need lots of help and support. That asking for help is not something shameful, something requiring repentance and humility, it is just good business sense.
The poor seldom have that.
One obstacle that is often thrown in front of the poor is shame, not that people aren’t prideful, but that respecting their right to human dignity is uncommon. I once asked a woman to introduce me to a man who runs a newsletter because I wanted to pitch him an article. She said she would, never did, and then offered me a job cleaning her bathrooms while handing me two giant bags of old clothing I did not want or need. What that’s called is a smack down. She thought I was being uppity, I had challenged her feelings of moral superiority by implying I was an equal in some way, and she felt the need to remind me of my place.
When people experience that kind of thing a few hundred times, it begins to take its toll on you, you stop asking for help, you stop trying to make connections, you start to believe the system is rigged against you and in many ways it is. It is a system built more on WHO you know than WHAT you know.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
We do enjoy the Brown family’s antics. I never knew why, but now you’ve clarified it! Lol
We are living our adventurous lifestyle. So many people we meet say they’d love to do what we’re doing. My husband always says they can do it, too, if they want! I guess I should write a post about it….I didn’t say before that we didn’t have any money when we married….in fact, I brought a school loan debt into our marriage. Just brought in a great work ethic taught to us by our parents who lived through the depression, living hand to mouth….
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Yes, you have a great tale to tell. It might be fun to write that post! 🙂
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I’ve enjoyed that show for the scenery and fishing but the dad always creeped me out, some need for drama in his life.
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Does he creep you out? I suspect the drama is mostly staged and part of the creepy element is about sensing the deception, the totally staged nature of that show. So they have to build the story up to a climax, to some potential disaster to keep you on the edge of your seat. What you can’t see is how they are totally surrounded by a camera crew of 20-30 people and how there is a store right behind them and off to the left. The kids make me laugh too, for allegedly having no access to technology, they still use a lot of references to pop culture.
He did marry her when she was 15 and they had seven kids, so I have no doubt that there are some political elements at play, some belief systems, some potentially creepy aspects.
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Just the way there is always a lurch from drama to drama, and always an excuse for everthing. If you know people like that it is best to stay away.
The older boys annoy the hell out of me. The youngest boy and the two girls are cute.
When I would see it on I would just mute it and watch them fish for halibut or something.
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Perfectly said IB. And the more you dig into this the more you realize how the game is stacked against the poor. For instance if you are poor and have $5 to spend on laundry detergent, you get a relatively small package. If you are well to do you can buy a much larger package for $7 or you can buy better detergent for $7. Either way the well to do gets their clothes cleaned cheaper and/or better than the poor for the same price – because they have more cash to start and can buy bargains and large sizes.
I was in my bank the other day – I had to replace a debit card that had been compromised – and there was a line up of about 15 customers when I joined the line. At one side there was a “business” teller who had 5 customers. There were three tellers working total and so two were working on the line of 5 business customers and one was working the poorer line of 15 (which grew to twenty) customers. No one thought that was even remarkable. The poorer people spent longer in line to accomplish the same thing as the richer people. Totally systemic. And so it goes. if I buy a car – a once every 7 years investment for me – I pay 50% more than the company that buys 10 per year. I had a tractor trailer that was having warrantee work done at Caterpillar. It was inside the garage and torn apart. The next day I dropped by and it was out in the yard with a tarp over it. i demanded to know why a competitors truck was now in the bay. I was told that my competitor would buy 10 Cat engines per year and I bought one every 5 years, so they come first. I was upset and went to the manager – he just shrugged and said I was fee to switch to another engine if I wanted – knowing full well that the story was the same at every business. I swallowed my anger and left.
It is like that everywhere IB – and that is a result of the economic structure we have built – it is a real cost, serving the poor.
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You’re so right, Paul. I swear, light bulbs and laundry soap are going to be the death of us all.
In the US we really do some crazy things, tax credits and solar panels for example. So if you purchase certain things you can get a tax credit which is an incentive to buy things. The only problem with a tax credit is you have to actually owe taxes to take advantage of it. If you’re poor, you probably don’t owe a lot of taxes, so what good is a tax credit?
Solar panels are one of the more ridiculous things. If you can afford the initial investment you get huge tax credits, than if you generate extra power you get to sell it to the utility company. The problem being the utility company pays a certain amount of money for electricity and just divides the cost among all the customers. So every time a well off person installs solar panels, the rest of us have to pay higher rates for electricity. So here we are actually generating more electricity, but totally fouling up the laws of supply and demand, by forcing the poor to subsidize the cost of people’s solar panels.
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Brilliant example IB – and every day for the poor is full of inequities that are systemic. It can become intolerable. I’m sure you have seen much of this in your work.
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I find myself in a weird middle ground on the poverty discussion. I come from welfare fraud and intermittent meals, I’ve lived on a campsite and spent years out of school due to family circumstances. I’ve been at the bottom: uneducated, no money, no connections, more worried about food and safety than getting a job. So I know it’s hard to get out. But I’ve also worked out how to sell my skills without investment since I was a young teen, starting out making bookmarks and clay figures to sell to tourists and locals, beginning tutoring when I was seventeen and living on my own in a house provided by benefits as I studied, eventually expanding into writing online and making the business reliable over the years. I think you can definitely pull yourself up by your bootstraps, because I can see where I was and I can see that I made it out, even if my sisters are still struggling to stay in education, haven’t left welfare and are disenfranchised. But it takes a lot, it takes taking chances, getting punched in the gut a few times, realizing that those closest to you are often those holding you back the most, intentionally or not. I’ve gone from losing my possessions and moving house every few years, from seeing my mother and sisters rifle through my bags to take the money I earned selling figurines, yet not eating that night… from that to not even thinking about money when my dog collapsed the other day and I called out an emergency vet, to having more in the bank than most aged 18-35, to knowing I can provide for at least my first two or three children on a basic income and that my business can be started and stopped and moved around as I please.
Many people who feel disenfranchised are actually overly attached to maladaptive behaviours, situations and people. My sister’s both display codependence, from being raised by a narcissistic mother who was raised by our psychopathic grandmother. This codependence keeps them from venturing out and keeps them looking for support and approval. It’s hard to stay in a good university when you need approval and your peers despise you. It takes a bit of hard work to nurture self-sufficiency and embrace loneliness when you grew up believing you were nothing without your family. I see the same patterns of substance abuse and dependence in one of my sisters as my father had, a weak coping mechanism for living with a mental disorder and feelings of isolation. I still have my own meltdowns and I still know I will never be good enough for my own standards. But I know I can’t afford to act on this, that I have to just keep acting like I care until I do care again. My sisters still believe there’s nothing wrong with using welfare to grab everything you can get and as far as I know, the whole family unit is still on welfare. It’s easy and comfortable. But it keeps you there and the longer you stay comfortable the harder it is to rejoin society. Had I remained attached to these people, still lived with them, no doubt their behaviours would have rubbed off on me some more too. I would probably still be on welfare, believe there was no way out, spend my life running away from people who made me feel inadequate and moving house, looking for support and love from strangers. The trap is as much the people as it is the environment or mentality or habits. And it’s hard to tear yourself away from one of those things, let alone tear from all four and step out alone into the unknown.
I still catch myself panicking when I see expenses and I would still rather skip a meal than buy an overpriced one. I still feel the itch to move house every few years. I still idealize the lives of the working poor and farmers I grew up with and I still aim to have a smallholding away from society as soon as I can, because I still want to be in control of more aspects of my life. I still can’t really trust most people and would not share my money with anyone but Jon. But I’m at the other end of the tunnel now, so I guess a few scars were worth stepping out into the light.
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What a great comment! That’s what I’m talking about! We people have a lot of wisdom and experience (and some great tales to tell.) I think sharing some of our stories can really help to encourage others. I think people who have survived poverty have a lot to teach people who are well off, too. We often have skills they do not, both practical and emotional 🙂
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I like to think of people who have walked many paths in life as being somehow wiser and having more information than those who have always lived one life. But I also know it’s just my own ego and hopefulness, because the people who have always been well off or always been poor will likely have experiences I did not get time to live. I never got to experience relying on a crop for dinner, or maxing out a parent’s credit card, or witnessing prescription med addiction, or an important internship. Any lessons to be learned there have either been gleaned from observation and anecdotes, or completely lost to me.
It’s a “jack of all trades” situation where you only have so much time in which to absorb the information around you, really, and I think everyone stands to learn from everyone else. So I’m all for sharing stories, even if the most interesting ones are closer to a novel than a paragraph. 😛
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Ah, I like that attitude very much. There are somethings I am grateful not to have experienced, addiction to pills for instance.
One thing that can be hard for more well off people is social status, reputation, what others think of you. So while integrity is all well and good, I was somewhat baffled by the amount of distress someone once felt over being embarrassed, ashamed, by some pictures taken at a party. They were hardly risque or a big deal, but this person had to deal with the risk of publicity. I myself do not have to hide from the paparazzi, real or imagined, nor do I have to live a double life, presenting a public persona versus a private one. 🙂
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The Brown family is doing a TV show about what their life was like maybe a decade ago. During filming, they live in a lodge and go down to the shack to act out the different story lines. From what I’ve seen, Alaskans comprise all types. Maybe the Browns were more grifters than frontiersmen. Then again, everyone finds a way to get by,
The thing about freedom is that it comes with a little fear. It’s why people seek the protection of communities. There was a short period (it felt like forever at the time) where I didn’t know where we were going to live or if we could even stay. In a weird way, it was also freeing to consider making a fresh start. Instead, I fell into a comfortable rut. That ends up being the trade off.
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He does come from a wealthy family, but it’s my understanding most–if not all–of that money was in flux due to his family’s greed. The show is totally silly, but it is good fun!
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