> fuck the rich
>
> i hate them all
I couldn't think of anything short to say to this, ef.
Except: yeah. No doubt. Etc.
I'm trying to write this piece on Johnnie Tillmon. A tribute to her life
and works. She was a welfare activist who died a couple years back.
Nobody cared, really.
I care, of course. Tillmon meant a lot to me. I once took an essay of
hers, "Welfare Is A Women's Issue," into a classroom at a prestigious
university, where I was pursuing my doctoral degree. The other students
argued that Tillmon's work didn't belong in a theory class. They said
what she wrote wasn't "theory." One of them, another Latina, went as far
as to accuse me of making the course "anti-intellectual." Gack.
Writing this piece, or trying to write it, is hard for me. I'm too close
to it. I read stuff about welfare reform in the 1960s, and remember my
mother -- how outraged she was when they tried to get her to have a car,
because it meant staying on welfare several more years. And other stuff
like that. Like how disappointed she was when I ended up on welfare,
after I dropped out of high school, then got married and pregnant and
divorced the first time. I was 15, when I dropped out of school; 19 when
I got married; 20 when I got divorced. Or 21?
I can't remember anymore what changes, what doesn't. Or whose fault it
is.
Nowhere to place the blame, exactly. So I end up just hating everything.
Canela
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