Last edited Tue Jul 30, 2013, 10:48 AM - Edit history (2)
...boiling them does little good when you have no place to wash them.
Believe me as a low income mom with 3 kids, two of them babies in diapers while working full time and no washing machine, it was imperative to have paper diapers. As an older mom (the two babies were born less than 1 year apart) I knew about using cloth diapers. The expense of going to a laundromat was impossible ~ much less the time needed to do that as there was little.
Adding to trying to wash diapers, doing the 6 or 7 loads a week of regular laundry was enough!!! Often I did that laundry in the bathtub and hung the clothes around the apartment to dry. I had learned from my mother how to do clothes in the "ricky-tic" washer, a wringer washer. I did not have a wringer washer, but the method there is quite green. You begin with the hottest water and wash the whites first. You rinse each load in another tub of clear water. Then you re-use the soapy water for the lighter colors on down to the dark colors, as the last load, using the same water and maybe adding a little soap. She taught me how to shave off soap from bars of Fells Naptha soap, which was cheap. It did not make the prettiest apartment but hey, it was an affordable way. Plus I could "do the laundry" at home while dong other imperative chores and minding the kids, helping with homework, etc.
I used to feel guilty about using paper diapers thinking they were "filling up our landfills" until I began to be an activist for low income people. One of the people I met was a policy wonk working for the city whose main job was about waste management. When he told me that over 90% of landfill waste was from business waste, I no longer felt bad ~ but affording those diapers was a constant worry.
To me the biggest luxury would have been to have a washer in the home, but many apartments expect people to do their laundry at their expensive laundry room where the equipment is not kept up. They are expensive when things like the the dryer does not work and you pay over and over in order to get the clothes dry. If I REALLY wanted to "live it up" I might use the washer and then take the wet clothes home to hang up.
I am not saying you are doing this but, often upper income people take for granted things that poor people simply do not have access to and need. They will say stuff like "why don't they just (insert whatever solution they think they have) ..." Well that "just" usually costs money that the poor does not have or it costs precious time that could be used for other needs. I learned to change my own oil, fix simple things in the home, and do what needed to be done to attend to my children's needs with little or nothing. To "just" do something like use cloth diapers and boil them, usually costs more time and money than paper diapers, see?
I hope this helps people who are trying to understand people in poverty because it is very appreciated that at least you try when most people demonize the poor and think they are "lazy" and that is why they are poor. They do not understand that poverty is an institution embedded within our society that they themselves depend upon in order to keep their own class positions. While it is perfectly legal to use class to discriminate against someone who is poor, the reasons this Institutions exists is because it depends on illegal discriminations. The Institute of Poverty is based on the classism encompassing racism, sexism, ageism, and disabilities.
The Institution of Poverty generates $Billions in the Poverty Industry for the upper classes, for things like the cheap labor. Mega "non-profits" exploit the poor by using them for tax deductions and cheap labor (sometimes even forced unpaid labor ~ that for-profit corporations also enjoy while getting government funds for "being so nice" as to "let" someone work for free). The truth is with a mega-non profit gets on the average of $57,000-64,000 per client yet only uses about $2000 of that in direct services, so mega-non-profits are mostly there for the upper classes. The truth is that mega-nons are just employment and tax breaks for the upper classes that does little for the poor,. And then there is middle class employment in order to "fix" poor people rather than address the entire institution. This denial creates government and university jobs that are generated for the upper classes to "study" and "manage" the poor. There is also the mental health and medical fields who employ the upper and middle classes (while exploiting McJob workers to do the hardest work), in order to "fix" the person but does little to address the whole Poverty Institution and the industries poverty generate.
Finally, we do not have any respect for unpaid work. Do you know, according to the AARP, that (mostly) women lose on the average of over $400,000 in a work lifetime performing unpaid labor? It would cost $Trillions if we had to create more institutions to replace that work so that women could go out making rich men richer saying, "Do you want fries with that?" Also according to the AARP studies they have done, this unpaid work SAVES our communities over $450BILLION a year! Yet codified into law that work is "doing nothing" according to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act only paid work is "doing something". This unpaid labor is not just about the raising of our children to care for our future, it is also about the unpaid care of our elders and our spouse. Each time, this need for 24/7 care causes (mostly) women to make the agonizing choice between working for a wage or caring for these loved ones. http://www.aarp.org/home-family/caregiving/info-10-2012/home-alone-family-caregivers-providing-complex-chronic-care.html
Indeed the Social Security calls all this unpaid labor "zero years" so it will not count any of that labor for any support that is saving $Billions. Most care givers have to live off their loved one's income, they get nothing. After their loved one dies or grows up after using up all the resources, then they are tossed to the street since they "did not work". Poor women do ALL this work, paid and unpaid while making 70 cents for every man's dollar on wages that won't even pay the rent.
I know what I am speaking about is scary. I also do not think this is conscience intent so much as taken for granted and hidden from view by a kind of benign denial. But often the use of "why don't they just..." is really trying to fix individual people who are caught in that poisonous spider's web of the Poverty institution. So by viewing people in poverty who individually need to be "fixed" because they "choose" to live in those conditions, is a way to keep the Institution of Poverty in place and all those illegal "isms" hidden. It blankets all of them with the use of "poverty" in order to pretend the illegal reasons are *not* the reason. This way the huge industry of poverty will never be recognized, from which the upper classes can continue to profit and benefit. See?
Hope this helps and I really appreciate your trying to understand what poor people need!
Love, Cat in Seattle
Board member of POWER: http://www.mamapower.org
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