Looking back on the past few weeks, Johnnie Levy can see how she was driven to the brink of death and didn’t care.
The sharpest economic downturn of her 63 years stripped Levy of her beloved job as a seamstress and unravelled her world until she found herself sitting in a Tulsa church hall waiting to see a nurse with a syringe in one hand and a Bible in the other.
Tulsa has seen its share of desperation over the years. In the 1930s it saw a tide of hundreds of thousands struggling west along Route 66 to escape economic collapse in the north and the notorious dustbowl of drought and wind across the midwest. Whether they had lost their land or their jobs, the flow of impoverished humanity — chronicled so devastatingly through the fictional Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath — struggled hard to feed and clothe their children as they trekked toward an illusory dream of prosperity in distant California.
To travel the old road today — stumbling upon crumbling ghost towns and half abandoned communities, the sprawling native American desert reservations, through cities where people work all the hours they aren’t sleeping and still cannot afford to go to the doctor — is to encounter new despair, some of it still recognizable to the Joads. The banks are once again evicting. Foreclosures plague the parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico traversed by the evicted 70 years ago.
But the monster, as Steinbeck described the financial system, has spawned modern beasts unknown to the Joads, such as vast multinationals discarding US workers in favor of cheaper labor in Mexico and the health insurance companies that cut off medical lifelines to the gravely ill.
And those who fall off the juggernaut of US capitalism, like Levy, or who fail to find space on it in the first place, face considerable challenges in a land with an inherent suspicion of people in need.
At Tulsa’s Friendship Baptist Church, there were a dozen or more staring at a television with an animated preacher beseeching them to follow the word of God. Everyone had an eye on a door at the front of the church. Periodically a name was called to a van in the car park painted with the logo Good Samaritan, in which doctors and nurses — all required to be good Christians — offered free consultations and medicines to those whom Oklahoma’s hospitals don’t want to see because they can’t pay.
The van makes the rounds of Tulsa’s churches in run-down neighborhoods, providing for the working poor, struggling pensioners and newly unemployed Americans when their health becomes an extra burden to the daily trial of paying rent and putting food on the table.
“I’m a seamstress and I love to sew,” Levy said. “I bragged about the fact that was the best job I’ve ever had. It affected me very emotionally when I lost my job. That’s one of the reasons I stopped taking the medications. I got to the point where I didn’t care, and that’s not right.”
Levy was cut adrift when the recession wiped out her job in June, taking with it the medical insurance that paid the cost of the daily dose of insulin she needs to counter diabetes.
Although she has a pension, most of it is taken by rent on a one-bedroom apartmant and food and utilities. She shakes her head at her confused priorities but said there simply wasn’t enough money left to meet the high cost of medicines.
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