Illegal to be Poor

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”    -Henry David Thoreau

Currently, by my own choice, I live in poverty. My yearly income averages about $8000. If I wanted, I could make more money; however, my problem is what I would have to do in order to achieve that. Someone once told me that it takes money to make money. This sounds cute because it rhymes, but there is some truth to it. If I wanted to make a lot of money, I would first need to either move to a large city, or buy a car. Both of these would cost a small chunk of money, or involve me getting into debt, which I refuse to do.

Rather than getting into debt, I choose to live a more simple lifestyle. I live with a small group of people, which allows us to keep our rent low by sharing the costs. My transportation is either biking, hitchhiking, or getting rides from people who are going in the same direction. All of my clothes are second-hand from thrift stores. Sometimes my food is not so glamorous as my more well-to-do friends who buy all organic, or eat out at restuarants, while I dine on bologna sandwiches or spaghetti.

But even though I live in circumstances that might sound miserable to some people, I can honestly say that I am perfectly happy and content. My stress level is practically non-existent, since I do not have a lot of things to worry about. I am able to keep up with all of my monthly bills by working minimum wage at various jobs such as dishwashing, which require little effort. In my spare time I read, write, go on hikes, or work on art projects. Basically I live within my means and keep my pleasures simple.

I do understand that some people have children and might need to have a car, or work longer hours in order to feed more people. My friends who do have kids all have cars, which complicates things a little more, but these same friends are working on ways to lower their costs where they can by simple things such as growing gardens, using WVO for fuel, and recycling gray water (which goes to the gardens).

Some of these things that we do to keep our cost of living down are, according to current California laws, illegal. For example, using gray water, which is basically taking the water that runs down your sink drain and diverting it into your garden to water your plants. Sounds harmless right? Well, it is, but it is also against the law. So is using Vegetable oil to fuel your car, unless you are keeping track of every gallon you use and paying taxes on it. Another one is HitchHiking (in certain spots which vary by county, state and whatever officer of the law who happens to spot you.)

None of these things are harmful in any way. As a matter of fact, by hitchhiking, I am able to have one less car on the road polluting the environment. By using gray water, less water is going into the sewage system and instead is helping to grow food. By using waste vegetable oil instead of fossil fuels to power your vehicle, you are recycling a waste product, driving a cleaner burning car, and helping our country reduce its dependancy on foreign oil.

There seem to be all sorts of laws that prohibit or at least try to foil such lifestyles as we try to live. It almost seems that the only way to be on the correct side of the law is to live in  family per house (even if the house is bigger than the family needs), buy all of your food from a sanctioned grocery store owned by some corporation, drive a car everywhere you need to go (fueled by big money gas) and flush all of your water down the drain into whatever sort of sewage your area uses.

All of these laws are issued under the guise of protecting us, (from what I am not certain..dirtiness maybe?)  but a careful look will see that many of these sort of laws really protect the interests of large corporations: the ones that own the gas pumps, wal-marts and chain grocery stores; or the interests of those who own property and don’t want the “value” of their property diminished by the appearance of poverty.

Somewhere along the way, it has almost become illegal to be poor. Living outside of the norms is not only frowned upon, but certain laws prohibit trying to live more simple and less wasteful lives.

If being poor sometimes brings one to gray areas of the law, then being homeless is almost a crime in itself. In my travels (by hitchhiking chiefly,) I have found that being homeless immediately makes you eligible for search, humiliation, arrest, and harassment. There are laws in many cities where it is illegal to sleep outside. If you are homeless, you break the law as often as you go to sleep. For this crime you can be ticketed and fined. If you have no money and do not pay the fine than you can be subject to arrest. I am making it sound bad, but that is because it is bad. For those homeless people fortunate enough to have a car, there are still laws that make it illegal to sleep in your car, and often police will violently wake you up and force you to “move on”  in the middle of the night.

I am not sure what the premise is behind these laws. Do lawmakers think that by driving away homeless and poor people then there will be less homeless or poor people?  Will one day there be areas where admittance is gained by proof of income? Hopefully not, but if these types of laws continue, and the type of thinking that values the accumulating of wealth over the  individual person, then there will certainly be such things as cities restricted to the wealthy, and prisons for the poor.

If our country’s recession continues, there might be a lot of people who start discovering these things. Maybe then there will  be more of an outcry about why such laws belittle human lives. For this reason, I have hopes, not that our country will collapse or go into another depression, but rather that people will be forced to reconsider their lifestyles and take into consideration methods that the poor have already been working on, even though they have been made outlaws for it.