We live in a world where celebrities wear $350,000 watches and nobody thinks of it.
We live in a world where a billionaire parked his $590-million yacht off our Maine island during a pandemic and people mostly shrugged and said, “That’s cool.”
But is it?
“I currently feel like there’s tremendous injustice in this society,” Alexandra Korry said in her final interview before her death from ovarian cancer. “There is ridiculous inequality between the rich and everybody else. And we all have an obligation to do something about it.”
But mostly we just gawp at it. Or most of us do.
We watch Kardashians.
We long for expensive watches and yachts, second and third homes when many people don’t have first homes.
And the gap between the income levels in the U.S. is growing and growing.
I grew up poor even though my older brother and sister grew up middle class. We had credit card companies calling every day. My poor mom would weep about money, struggling to hang on sometimes. My sister and brother didn’t know this or live this and I’m so glad for them.
I have slept in an apartment where the ceiling was caving in and it sucked, honestly.
And I spend a lot of my time trying to make sure that I’m never back in that place. And I spend a lot of my time worrying that I will.
I’m not alone. More and more people are living that fear right now. Living it.
In 2019, the top 20% of the population earned 51.9% of all U.S. income.3 Their average household income was $254,449. The richest of the rich, the top 5%, earned 23% of all income. Their average household income was $451,122.
The bottom 20% only earned 3.1% of the nation’s income. The lower earner’s average household income was $15,286.4
Most low-wage workers receive no health insurance, sick days, or pension plans from their employers. They can’t get ill and have no hope of retiring. That creates health care inequality, which increases the cost of medical care for everyone. Also, people who can’t afford preventive care will wind up in the hospital emergency room. In 2014, 15.4% of uninsured patients who visited the ER said they went because they had no other place to go.5 They use the emergency room as their primary care physician. The hospitals passed this cost along to Medicaid.
And then there are the racial inequities. Black Americans have been exploited and discriminated against for centuries. A white household’s median net worth is about ten times more than a Black household. That’s not just not right. It’s a big wrong.
And then there is gender.
In the Closing the Women’s Wealth Gap’s 2017 report, “U.S. women own just $0.32 for every $1 a man owns. That amount is even lower for Black and Latina women — mere pennies to every dollar owned by white men and women.”
When I was a kid at Bates College, I spent a lot of my time feeling like less. My family had been kind of poor after my step-father died. My nana would stand in line to get us big orange blocks of commodity cheese for the week to supplement our $30 grocery budget Every week my mom would yell at her that we didn’t need that. She always took it.
My mom didn’t answer the phone because she was so afraid of credit card companies calling. She’d make me do it and lie that she wasn’t there.
I still hate answering the phone, even the cell phone, even when it has caller ID.
Anyway, when I went to college I wanted to forget all that. I wanted to be an intellectual like everyone else. I wanted to have gone to private school in Manhattan or Conneticut, have a summer home in the Hamptons and clothes that weren’t from K-Mart, which was sort of the WalMart equivalent back then, but worse.
I got over all that because I knew it was pretty shallow. What I had a harder time getting over was class issues that had less to do with materialism and more to do with hatred and intellectual history.
In one of my directing classes, one of the sexier straight guys actually announced about Beckett, “People who are not wealthy don’t care about this. A truck driver doesn’t watch public television or listen to NPR. They don’t care, they’re too busy humping and eating and drinking.”
My dad was a truck driver. He watched public television. He listened to NPR. I didn’t want to think about him humping. He ate food. He didn’t drink. His parents had been prohibitionists.
In one of my playwrighting classes the professor announced, “The working people of this country don’t give a shit about nuclear power. They don’t give a shit about a man of color.”
When I was in elementary school my dad would bring him with him to protest the same nuclear power plant that my step dad was helping to build. He helped me try to get New Hampshire to recognize Martin Luther King Day and do a hundred other civil rights things. He cared.
And one of my college friends would love to say, “Carrie is too poor to be pro intellectual.”
He’s a minister now. That still doesn’t make what he said right.
And one of my female poetry teachers told me over and over again, her voice trilling up with her patrician accent, “Carrie, you have the potential to be a poet, but your voice is too raw, not refined, not artistic enough.”
My voice was poor. My cadence was public school. I was not from rich. Every sentence I spoke showed that.
They still do.
Those are just four of the incidents that made me both angry and intimidated and focused, but in the back of my head it just inflamed my self doubt. I could never be a poet because I wasn’t wealthy, private-school educated, my parents weren’t intellectuals. I could never move people with words because my words were too stark and my sentences too short. I would never fit in because I didn’t have the background that most of the other students had.
And then two things happened. I read Sherman Alexie, a not-wealthy Spokane and Coeur d’Alene who despite his issues with women, impacted me positively. Maybe because I never met him.
And I met Seamus Heaney in real life.
Seamus Heaney came to our college at the invitation of Robert Farnsworth, who was an awesome poet and professor. He met with students, he gave a reading and we all got to hang out with him at a reception.
“I can’t go,” I told my boyfriend at the time.
He bit into his pizza. He was always eating pizza. “Why not?”
“Because it’s Seamus Heaney,” I answered staring at the little bits of sausage on the pizza before I plucked them off.
“So?”
“Seamus Heaney!”
“So?”
I didn’t know how to explain. Seamus Heaney was THE poet, the Nobel Prize winner. He was Irish for God’s sake. Those people were gifted with words. They had so many amazing poets… Heaney, Yeats, Wilde, Clarke, Moore. I was from New Hampshire. We had Robert Frost but pretty much every New England state tried to claim him.
Heaney wrote things like:
“A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.”
You will regret it if you don’t go,” my boyfriend said. “I’m going to just be playing Leisure Suit Larry anyway.”
So, I went, as anxious as if I was going on stage myself. Heaney transfixed me with his amazing baritone and bear-like presence. And his words… Of course his words… And when I met him afterwards, I was terrified until he grabbed my hand in his and said, “So you are a poet?”
And I said, “No.”
And all he did was nod and say, “Oh, yes you are.”
But in his eyes was this knowing, this connection, and maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe I just saw it because I wanted him to understand me, because I wanted someone to get who I was and who I wanted to be. Or maybe not?
I don’t know, but one second later my professor said, “Oh, yes she is. I told you about her. She is like you.”
And then one of them said something about growing up not wealthy and I can’t remember the exact words, but what I do remember is that I finally felt understood. Later, I looked up Seamus Heaney’s past, about how his dad was a farmer and neither of his parents were big on words really, not in the intellectual way that everyone in college seemed to be. I found out that he was like me a little bit not because he was a poet and I was trying so desperately hard to write just one decent poem, but because we were both human, that we both came from humble places, that we both looked in people’s eyes when we said hello.
And that was enough for me. That was enough for me to believe in myself.
Seamus Heaney performed a miracle when I met him. He made me believe that I could be whatever the hell I wanted to be and that it didn’t matter how hard I had to fight or work or not fit in. What mattered was that I wanted the miracle of being a writer, of metamorphosis from Carrie the poor neurotic kid from Bedford, New Hampshire into Carrie Jones, the neurotic best-selling author who lives on the coast of Maine.
He gave hope and miracles in his poems and in his person and I am so thankful for his existence and so sorry for the world’s loss.
“The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.”
I wrote this post back in 2013 when Seamus Heaney died, but in one of my student packet’s this week, I referenced Heaney and then yesterday I saw this Liam Neeson video (randomly) where he was talking about Heaney, so… there you go. I’ve reposted it.
You can help with poetry and kids. These images are from Get Lit’s website and Get Lit is making a difference.
“Get Lit was founded in 2006 after Diane Luby Lane created a one-woman show about the power of words and toured colleges with iconic Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. After the show closed, she couldn’t bear the thought of cutting off the work completely. She started teaching classic and spoken word poetry in two high schools, Fairfax and Walt Whitman. When the semester ended… the students wouldn’t leave. They insisted on meeting after school. The rest is history. Today, the curriculum has expanded to almost 100 schools, and the Get Lit Players are the most watched poets on the internet. Curriculum requests flow in from Mexico to New Zealand.”
Get Lit “uses poetry to increase literacy, empower youth, and inspire communities.”
Get Lit works – 98% of Get Lit Players go to college, and 70% get scholarships!
Carrie’s super excited about the upcoming TIME STOPPERS book coming out this August.
This middle grade fantasy series happens in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine and it’s all about friendship and magic and kids saving their magical town.
An imaginative blend of fantasy, whimsy, and suspense, with a charming cast of underdog characters . . . This new fantasy series will entice younger fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.” – School Library Journal
“Sticks the landing . . . The world building is engaging . . . between the decidedly wonderful residents and the terrifying monsters who plague them.” – BCCB
“Amid the magic, spells, adventure, and weirdness of this fantasy are embedded not-so-subtle life lessons about kindness, friendship, and cooperation.” – Booklist
“A wild and fresh take on fantasy with an intriguing cast of characters. Dangerous and scary and fun all rolled into one. In the words of Eva the dwarf, I freaking loved it!” – Lisa McMann, New York Times bestselling author of The Unwanteds series
“Effervescent, funny, and genuine.” – Kirkus Reviews
It’s quirky. It’s awesome. It’s full of heart. You should go by the first two books now. 🙂
Time Stoppers
Time Stopper Series
Time Stoppers Front and Back Covers – US versions
CARRIE’S BOOKS
For a complete round-up of Carrie’s 16-or-so books, check out her website. And if you like us, or our podcast, or just want to support a writer, please buy one of those books, or leave a review on a site like Amazon. Those reviews help. It’s all some weird marketing algorhthym from hell, basically.
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