Poverty and Homelessness: Cockroaches 1, Humans 0

Over a year ago, a fascinating study was released about how cockroaches share available shelters:

Researchers offered 50 cockroach larvae their choice of three shelters that could each house more than 50 cockroaches. All 50 tended to crowd into the same shelter.

When the shelters were swapped with smaller versions that could hold just 40 cockroaches, the group would typically split into two groups of about 25, leaving one house unoccupied.

“It’s better, in terms of group benefits, to have a 50/50 split instead of one important, large group and one that’s less robust,” said study coauthor Jose Halloy of the Universite libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

emphasis mine

Roaches have decided that every roach matters. This study is fascinating, and exciting, and damning for human society.

Before any concern trolls inform me that cockroaches are “designed” to live communally and humans aren’t, I’ll remind you that adaptation is all about what works in the current environment. Roaches have figured out what works, while humans are failing miserably.

Roaches, even immature roaches, understand that everyone does better when everyone does better. Humans can’t seem to grasp this simple fact.

An American Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, in a place not far from you, there was a little girl whose family was worried about MONEY. One day the girl’s father died, and MONEY became a very big problem for the family. The girl’s mother worried about money. The little girl worried about money, and it made her stomach hurt. As she grew up, she decided that she would go to college and get an Advanced Degree so that she would have some security in her life and so she could stop being scared about MONEY all the time.

The girl, now a woman, could not afford college. She could barely support herself working full-time at her minimum-wage job. People seemed to understand that it was hard to pay tuition, but no one seemed to grasp that it was impossible to support yourself while going to school if you were on your own. The woman worked one full-time job and one part-time job, and attended night school for four years. Then she went to school full-time, and worked two part-time jobs. She had to apply for LOAN after LOAN to stay in school. She beat the worries down with thoughts of her Advanced Degree. She felt guilty about worrying, since she had it so much better than so many other people.

The woman was working on the beloved Advanced Degree when she became very, very sick, and could not work. Her Evil Advisor said “Depressives don’t belong in research!” and kicked her out of graduate school with a lowly Masters Degree, an inferior type of Advanced Degree. The woman had to resort to using credit cards to pay for her health insurance, visits to the doctor, and medication. The credit card balances mushroomed and the student loans came due!

With time, the woman recovered, and was able to work hard. The credit card balances were paid off eventually, and the woman accepted that the student loans were going to be part of her life for a long time. The anxiety fed on this, but that was ok, since she had lived with her friend, anxiety, for a long time. The woman’s inferior Advanced Degree qualified her to work in a job she loved. All was well.

Alas, the woman became sick again. Her brain was sick, her immune system was sick, and all of her joints and muscles were sick. These conditions were permanent and she had to face the fact that she might not ever work again. The woman had to resort to using credit cards to pay for her health insurance, visits to the doctor, and medication. The credit card balances mushroomed and the student loan payments kept coming. The woman watched all of her hard work evaporate, and the debt monster grew bigger by the day. She started wondering about which she should do first: default on her student loans, or cancel her health insurance.

People said she was very Stupid, Irresponsible, and Selfish. They succeeded at life, why couldn’t she? The woman agreed with them. She had been Stupid to pursue an education when it meant mortgaging her future. She had been Irresponsible to get sick with so many different health problems. Finally, she had been Selfish to try to take care of herself and to seek medical help-those resources were only for the rich.

The moral of the story: Don’t try to stay alive, let alone succeed, in America unless an accident of birth makes you wealthy.

Alternate moral: Don’t get sick.

Health and Class

I hope everyone who smugly enjoys good health gets a frigging clue and realizes that they are lucky, not good. I hope that people who feel superior to those with poor health get smacked with a big dose of random chance. I hope that people with class privilege who sneer at the poor lose all of their privilege and have to navigate the US health system alone. I hope that every doctor who writes derisively of Medicaid patients has to undergo a painful rectal procedure.

I wish.