George and the Economy

"His picture stares at me.
Plastic expressions, for the world to see.
Something fake and meaningless to me.
I cannot respect the man I loathe,
For what he's done to us.
The poor are poorer,
While middle class is lowered,
And the high-class is highered,
As the undeserving get richer.
And WE work HARDER
WE BLEED HARDER
As his WHIP cracks into our backs."

I wrote this poem in 2005, shortly after getting stationed at Ft. Meade, MD. I was on "watch," where I stood pointlessly at the front door of the base's Navy "DINFOS" barracks, militantly greeting Sailors and visitors as they entered the front door. The building was dillapitated. Mold grew on the walls and in the carpet in many rooms. Nothing was updated, mostly thirty year old fixtures that we painted over to "look like new" and floors we waxed and polished with ten year old equipment. We were lucky if we were provided with an adequate amount of wax to squirt onto the floor. All while wearing uniforms we paid for out of our checks, or "uniform allowance," that was never quite enough to cover the amount we actually paid for uniforms (300 a year when we probably paid about 600).

At this point, I was getting paid as an E-3 (I'm talking 250-300 a week), taking a pay cut to go to defense information school for two months and trying to receive some kind of education. While onboard ship, where quality of life is five times worse (hard to believe), I received allowances, incentive pay, in order to distract myself with new clothing, hair dyes, wild parties, and dining so I wouldn't constantly complain about the poor quality of my life (which I did anyway). My job aboard ship was that of a "deck seaman," a position rumored to be done away with in the future (possibly already happened?) because nobody wanted the job and it was causing "morale issues." In deck department, I did much of what I did at DINFOS while "waiting for orders;" mopped floors, cleaned assigned areas, and sometimes supervised cleaning. I also did what we called "needle-gunning," chipping paint, rust, etc., painting the sides of the ship, painting the interior of the ship, waxing floors, and making it look shiny and pretty for the captain and his helpers. I stood watches at-sea, during which I would look out into the ocean, sea, or gulf and speak into twenty year old "sound-powered telephones" about any "surface contacts" or things on the water I encountered during this time. Other watches included shining the brass work on the "bridge," which is where the Captain sits to eat his meals and watch flight operations. It is also where officers look out into the water and, with the help of their navigation team (many of them enlisted), tell us (the deck seamen) where to steer the ship and how fast to go. Seems like a lot of duties for a 19-20 year old getting paid only 350-400 dollars a week. If they hadn't been providing me with a gray, metal roof over my head, a bed barely long enough for my 5'2" body where I slept on top of two other females (the beds, or "cubby holes, or "racks," were stacked 3-high), two footlockers to hold all of my personal belongings, a bathroom with 3 inches of water and mold on the floor and all its fixtures, a shower that sometimes shoots out cold water if you're lucky, randomly placed water fountains that put out warm, brown water when functioning at all, and food I sometimes had to wait in line two hours to receive, only to find it came out of a box of frozen meat patties marked "not for institutional use" or "Grade D," I would not had been able to afford to survive in this economy. I'm just glad I was a vegetarian and didn't have problems with motion sickness. I guess there's no time or energy for motion sickness when you're dealing with all your other troubles. . . .

So, after escaping the horrors that are an aircraft carrier I reported to DINFOS. Quality of life was a little better for me, considering I lived down the street from my mother and grandmother who helped me greatly, but my pay was still considerably low as I said. The military did not feel like paying for me to go to another duty station after I finished my two month class at DINFOS, so I waited at the moldy army barracks for ten months until they decided to send me back to Norfolk, VA (which was where my aircraft carrier was stationed) to be on shore duty (hallelujiah!). Being a 20 year old female, traumatized by my experiences on the aircraft carrier, guilt-stricken about the many men I had slept with in failed attempts to hide from my suffering and distract myself further, I clung desperately to whatever I could find that would keep me from falling back into this lifestyle. That was when I decided to get married. This is a woman who said she would never, ever get married; never become dependent on another human being; never follow the same path my parents went down, my mother being married six times and divorced five, my father on his fourth marriage. I wasn't in love. I wasn't even in a particularly happy relationship. Neither of us were happy with our lives, with ourselves. We found some sort of satisfaction in excessive spending, concerts, conventions, art. We found some sort of satisfaction in our need to be together and to control each other viciously, to no prevail. We found some sort of satisfaction in trying to change each other to better fit what we were looking for, although neither of us knew who we were or what we were looking for in the first place. We clung to each other, and against everyone's best wishes (except my naive father who still, to this day, says "I thought you two were good together"), married March 17, 2006, eight months after meeting each other and about one month after I moved back to Norfolk. A month later, he was stationed in Bethesda, MD, a four hour drive in between.

In Norfolk, I was stationed at Fleet Public Affairs Center, Atlantic. Here, I learned how to write a news article, use a Nikon digital SLR camera, and "tell the Navy story," or make the Navy look good. This was probably one of the hardest parts of my job. There was one time I found a Sailor who was volunteering his time to speak out against domestic violence, so I interviewed the young man, who seemed to be more interested in finding a girlfriend than teaching anyone about domestic violence. I thought I'd found a good amongst the evil, but he had nothing to say when I interviewed him. The rest of the time, I photographed meaningless ceremonies of command changes and wrote articles about events where people carried on about leadership and financial fitness, only to blow hot air and never speak about any real issues. I would love if, some day, I could use the training I received from the military to show what Bush is really doing to this economy, to our enlisted military, and this nation's middle class. What I would love even more is if I never have to.


This will be continued, because there is so much more I can say on this issue but should clear my head so this doesn't become a billion pages of seemingly mindless dribble.