By Robert Dean

Carter County Times

I think there’s an unspoken boogeyman we don’t talk about. When you’ve been broke-broke, the fear that poverty could come back never really leaves. It hangs around in the background of your mind. You’re always waiting for something to go wrong. A new bill. A new expense. Something.

You can get a job, a steady paycheck, even a little breathing room, and still be haunted by the memory of counting change for gas or wondering which bill can wait another week. Being broke rewires your brain. Every paycheck becomes a game of Jenga, and you live under the tower, hoping nothing falls. I have an excellent job. I’m one of the few writers who actually make a living. But I’ve known hard times, capital H and T. Even with two checks a month, I still find myself asking, how do I carve this up for rent, utilities, food? All while shaming myself with another question; What do I go to work for if every small indulgence comes with a voice saying you can’t afford this, even when you technically can? You shouldn’t feel morally beaten down because you want tacos or a new t-shirt, but that’s how it works. Bills become an emotional prison.

When you’ve been broke, you nickel and dime everything. You grab the off-brand bread. You fill the tank halfway. You buy cleaning supplies at the dollar store. Not because you’re frugal, but because you’re bracing for impact. You keep a few extra bucks around in case the other shoe drops, or at least until the next paycheck hits. I am very well acquainted with having sixty-five dollars in the bank and waiting for payday like it’s a life raft.

I use my phone’s calculator constantly, asking if I should wait a few days to pay this bill, if I can afford that charge. A broke person wakes up in the middle of the night convinced the sound outside is a tow truck coming for the car. Even with a job, the math never stops. It’s seventy-eight dollars for almost nothing at the grocery store. Forty-three dollars to feed the family at McDonald’s. A knot in your stomach waiting to see the heating bill.

That’s the part people never talk about. Getting out of the hole takes time, and most of us are one big bill away from the whole thing collapsing. Recently, I had to replace the engine in my Hyundai. Five thousand dollars. Did I have that sitting in the bank? Absolutely not. I took out a predatory loan. Now I’m looking at borrowing against my 401K just to climb back out. That’s how it works. You solve one emergency by creating the next one. I know people who travel constantly, who seem to live everywhere at once. They make about what I make. They see fun. I see three days of groceries. I make excuses instead of telling the truth. I’m scared to spend that much.

The mailbox becomes a source of dread. You avoid checking your bank balance because watching it drop, even for normal expenses, triggers panic. Every purchase turns into a survival equation. Forty dollars for jeans becomes two weeks of gas. Four grocery trips. The electric bill. Everything is measured against what it might cost you later. That’s the lasting damage of being broke.

Being broke isn’t just a financial state. It’s a trauma response that doesn’t care about your current bank balance. When someone says you could be better with money, it’s hard to reconcile that in a world of recurring payments where nothing is cheap. You get a raise, a better job, actual savings, but the fear doesn’t leave. You still think this could disappear tomorrow. Because you remember it disappearing before. You don’t trust stability because stability already betrayed you once.

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A few years ago, I came across a historical photograph that caught my attention. It showed a massive traffic jam in Sweden in 1967. Traffic jams, of course, are nothing remarkable. We’ve all endured them—whether during rush hour in a city or stuck behind a slow-moving tractor on a one-lane country road. But this one was different. The photograph captured a moment of complete and utter chaos, with no obvious cause.

Having read the caption of the photo, I knew the basic reason for the congestion, but I hadn’t given it much thought until Dr. Patrick DeVane, my pastor, referenced it in a recent sermon. He told the story of September 3, 1967—the day Sweden experienced Högertrafikomläggningen, better known to us non-Swedish speakers as the day the country switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.

This was not a decision the Swedes made lightly. The issue was hotly debated for eight years before a final determination was reached. The reason was that all their neighboring countries drove on the right and the vast majority of the vehicles owned by Swedes were designed to be driven on the right. The decision was made with the intent to reduce accidents. Even then though, the change was not immediate. The switch was scheduled to occur four years later, allowing ample time for a comprehensive public information campaign.

And what a campaign it was. There were the expected television and radio advertisements, along with signs and billboards. But the Swedes went further. The logo promoting the switch appeared on gloves, milk cartons, and even commemorative underwear. Perhaps the most inspired move of all was a songwriting contest hosted by Swedish television, inviting musicians to write a song about the change. The winning entry was Keep to the Right, Svensson, written by Peter Himmelstrand and performed by The Telstar. And, if you are curious, it is available on YouTube.

After four years of unrelenting messaging, you might assume the transition would be seamless. And, relatively speaking, it was. On the day of the switch, there were fewer traffic accidents than on an average day. The following day, there were even fewer. Clearly, the campaign had worked—or so it seemed.

Over the next six weeks, accident rates slowly crept back up. Within a year, they had returned to pre-switch levels. Well-intended as it was, the goal was not achieved.

The lesson, to me, is that change is difficult. And there may be no better time of year to illustrate that truth than January. Many of us make New Year’s resolutions—well-intended promises to ourselves. Yet by the time this column appears, a good number of them will already be broken.

According to Drive Research, 80 percent of Americans who make resolutions believe they’ll stick with them throughout the year. Only 9 percent actually do. And 23 percent fail before the end of the first week.

Did some of those people know they would fail? Probably. But I suspect most did not. They had good intentions. They had desire. Like the Swedes, they started strong. But life intervenes. One distracted moment and muscle memory takes over—you drift into the familiar left-hand lane, or into the McDonald’s drive-thru. It happens.

I’ve made plenty of resolutions over the years. A few I’ve kept, but most I haven’t. Even when I’ve succeeded, I’ve often found myself sliding back to old habits. One year, I resolved to lose 15 pounds. I did—fairly quickly, in fact. Goal achieved. And not long after, I was right back where I started. It felt less like learning a lesson and more like cramming for a test.

The novelist Henry Miller once wrote, “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.”

With that in mind, I no longer make resolutions with rigid finish lines. Instead of losing 15 pounds, I aim to eat healthier. Instead of reading 50 books, I want to read more. I’m less interested in temporary achievements and more interested in living better.

As the Swedes taught us, lasting change is hard. There will be setbacks along the way. But if we focus less on a defined destination and more on reshaping our habits, change may finally stick—and chaos may give way to something that feels a little more natural.

By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times

As the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was recruiting ICE storm troopers off the street with $50,000 sign-on bonuses, no one apparently provided those gun-toting, masked men with basic U.S. history.

Case in point – Among those swept up by ICE’s campaign of racial profiling in Minnesota were four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Three of them are said to remain jailed at an ICE detention facility at Fort Snelling, south of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Surely the folks in DHS are aware that Native Americans are automatically U.S. citizens, a right solidified by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, granting citizenship to all born within U.S. territorial boundaries.

Further, these individuals are established by law as dual citizens of their tribal nations and of the U.S. without needing to apply or renounce tribal ties, and this status cannot be removed by executive order.

There is another lesson of history either not shared or intentionally ignored because that same military post is where, in 1862, U.S. Army soldiers imprisoned about 1,700 Native American men, women, and children following the U.S.-Dakota War.

Many of those original Americans died of torture, starvation and disease. Their survivors were exiled to reservations in what now is South Dakota.

Fort Snelling is an especially painful legacy for Native Americans because 39 of their ancestors were hanged on a single day at that location in an order reportedly approved by President Andrew Johnson at the end of the fighting.

We should all remember that this country belonged to their ancestors long before the first boatload of white people landed on the East Coast. To me, it appears that ICE is determined to snatch as many bodies as possible in order to meet whatever goals have been set by the White House.

Sadly, this ridiculous detention of Native Americans in Minnesota is further evidence that the evil of white supremacy is alive and well in the hearts and minds of certain government insiders.

More and more, it appears that the political slogan of “Make America Great Again” has become nothing more than thinly-veiled camouflage for turning back the clock to the shameful  days of widespread racial discrimination.  

 Contact Keith at keithkappes@gmail.com.