Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

by Chris Arnade

It was three years of seeing just how messy life really is. How filled with pain, injustice, ambiguity, and problems too big for any one policy to address. It was also three years of seeing how resilient people can be, how community can thrive anywhere, even amid pain and poverty. Most of all I ended up finding what is often overlooked in stigmatized neighborhoods: dignity.

After two years of this, nobody close to me got out or succeeded. Nobody got clean or sober or ended up in a “little home with a white picket fence.” The only way anyone seemed to leave the streets was being sentenced to an upstate prison, or thrown in Rikers, or mandated to rehab, or killed.

We were well intended, but we had removed ourselves from the lived experiences of most of the country, including the places and people we wanted to help.

Our similar path to success, our education, and our isolation from the bulk of the country, left us with a narrow view of the world. We primarily valued what we could measure, and that meant material wealth. The things that couldn’t be easily measured—community, dignity, faith, happiness—were largely ignored because they were hard to see—especially from so far away. We had compassion for those left behind but thought that our job was to provide them an opportunity (no matter how small) to get where we were. We didn’t think about changing our definition of success. It didn’t occur to us that what we valued—getting more education and owning more stuff—wasn’t what everyone else wanted.

Our metrics for success became how high the stock market got, how large the profits were, how efficient the company was. If certain communities, towns, and people, suffered in this, it was all for the greater good in the name of progress.

Death is close enough that they prepare for it. Sometimes it even entices them. When someone ODs, the second question asked after who, is “On what?” What brand, what red label was the bag stamped with? Was it “Total Control,” or “Obama Care,” or “Ice Cream”? Then they search for it, because it is especially good shit, potent, and they can do enough to push themselves right to the limit. Maybe they write their momma’s phone number on their stomach in red marker. Or their husband’s, or wife’s, or sister’s, because if they find you dead, you want a proper burial.

“You lucky you only had one family to fuck you over. I was in foster care and got to be fucked over by a bunch of different families.” Being abused by the people who were supposed to rescue them was the ultimate destruction of trust, so they fled, running away either literally or mentally. Therapists call this “dissociation.” On the street they call it being fucked over, and one solution to being fucked over is taking drugs, mostly heroin.

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. —KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, “ME AND BOBBY MCGEE”