An Open Letter to Sen. Joe Manchin

By Joni Halpern

Dear Sen. Manchin,

I am writing to convey my sorrow that you are ill.  When you first won your Senate seat, people said “Joe Manchin is a guy who listens,”  “Joe Manchin is a guy who cares about his constituents,”  “Joe Manchin understands how his people struggle.”  But now we find you have your limits.  Human infrastructure is nowhere near as compelling as bridges, roads and Wi-Fi.  You can’t be spending money on people who don’t work.  That’s when I realized you are suffering from the same serious illness that afflicts so many American political figures.

In fact, you are a victim of a pandemic that has overtaken millions of our countrymen as well.  It is not COVID-19.  It is a blistering, foul smelling, open-sored ignorance caused by not knowing what it means to be poor in America.

I watched you commenting on the cost of the Reconciliation bill – the so-called “Build Back Better” bill – that is supposed to provide “human infrastructure” – namely, the things people need to help prepare and become available for work.  These are things like child care, dental and vision care, community college education, and other necessities that help human beings compete in a competitive job market of which a fundamental part is a service economy.

As I watched you pontificate from the back of your yacht, reminding your kayaking constituents that you can’t vote for this bill is because it costs too much money, and taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing people who don’t work, I thought I had found the source of your illness.  Maybe you just never knew the poor.

I think I do.  I have served them as a free lawyer for more than 25 years.  In that time, I have seen them by the hundreds in most of those years.  They have come to my office with their little ones so accustomed to long bus rides and longer walks that they don’t even bother anymore to try to get out of their strollers.  We called them “stroller babies.”  There was no child care available for them, because child care has never been adequately funded in this country.  So, while other kids of higher economic standing went to music, art, tumbling and “Mommy and Me” classes paid out-of-pocket by parents, these little folks learned to look at the world from a stroller.  Eventually, the urge to explore it left them.

You never met a little fellow like Joshua, who came to my office with his mom and two sisters when he was three years old.  He refused to take off his backpack, though it was heavy with toddler books.  He was used to living in a shelter that required its inhabitants to leave every morning by 6:30 a.m., take all their belongings with them, and wander the streets all day long without a penny for food or drink, until they were allowed to return to the shelter at 6 p.m.

I took Joshua and his family to lunch the first day we met.  They were hungry.  It took me half an hour to talk him into leaving his backpack locked in the car, so he could lighten his burden while he ate.  Finally, he gave in and eased the backpack onto the seat.  As soon as the car door slammed shut, he wailed and wouldn’t stop.  His mom explained he had once lost his precious backpack after taking it off in a shelter.  He never risked that loss again.

You never knew Rose, Sen. Manchin.  She was a devoted mother who cooked and cleaned meals on a hotplate and walked her children to school.  Having been abandoned by her husband, she was unable to find a place to live, not even a room inside someone’s house.  The rents were too high, and she was repaying the County for the cost of having previously housed her children in protective custody while it was determined that they were not skinny from neglect, but from their mother’s inability to navigate the chaotic food stamp application process.

You might have judged Rose harshly, Sen. Manchin.  She had not one dime for rent, no child care, no transportation, no way to free herself from her predicament to find work.  The cost of the small enclosed, unheated porch she rented for herself and her children was that she sleep with the owner of the house,  a mean-spirited, disheveled man who threatened her with eviction if he didn’t get his way.

I do not expect you ever met the thousands of people in your state, or the millions of others like them across America, who raise kids while working full-time at minimum-wage jobs that pay next to nothing, with no benefits, no health care, no sick leave, no future.  You probably pass by them without knowing them or seeing them.  They rise before the nine-to-fivers, get their kids ready for school, walk them to bus stops or take them on the bus with them, drop them at school and head on out to the “plantation,” where they bus tables, clean hotel rooms, scrub bathrooms, vacuum empty office buildings, mop hospital floors, dispose of noxious waste, clean the bodies of the infirm and the elderly, lift the disabled, watch over the children of the affluent, cook food they could never afford to put on their own table, and pick the fruits and vegetables in the fields that would cost us all so much more if it weren’t for the cheap labor.

You probably don’t know this, but almost all poor people work.  Even the ones who don’t have jobs work.  They climb into dumpsters after everything is closed, they fight with the rats in the park trash cans in order to harvest recyclable bottles.  They perform odd jobs for barter.  They walk the streets looking for what we throw away as garbage – broken chairs, desks, bookcases, tables, lamps, kitchen utensils and small appliances, anything they can sell to other poor people who can fix anything and resell it.

And then there are the romantic poor, like Mr. Embry.  Every year, on the anniversary of his marriage to his beloved Katherine, he walked for miles to harvest one good rose from each garden in an affluent neighborhood he visited late at night.  When I met him, he had been married 20 years.  “I have worked all my life,” he said.  “Hard work.  But I could never afford to buy my wife roses on our anniversary.”  He shook his head.  “But it’s getting harder to find them each year.  I have to walk miles now to get enough.  I don’t like to take more than one from each garden.  Roses are hard to grow.”

I did not hear you preach from the back of your yacht, Sen. Manchin, about why we can afford to raise the federal debt and deficit by giving rich people and billion-dollar corporations tax breaks.  I did not hear a peep from you about how the rich corporations were stealing our future by using their taxpayer-funded windfall to buy back their stock and stow away massive amounts of cash.  I never heard a whisper from you when they sent their lobbyists to Capitol Hill with wads of contributions to buy their bank holidays, so they could repatriate the fortunes they had sheltered overseas.  You were a man in public office for years before you were a senator, and I never heard you explain to your constituency why their hard-working, struggling families were less deserving than the clients of the lobbyists and campaign donors who funded you.

Yes, it costs money to help people in need, whether they are working in a job or working to stay alive, Sen. Manchin.  But you don’t know them as well as you know the wealthy.  You don’t know them as well as the people who support your candidacy.

You should look them up some day.  Maybe get off that yacht of yours and take a walk along the docks.  See who is recycling the trash, cleaning the restrooms, mopping the kitchens in the restaurants, walking the dogs for the folks away on a cruise.

You might meet someone who could cure the potentially fatal illness of your ignorance.

Sincerely,

Joni Halpern