Page 8 RAIN May 1978 RICH TECH/POOR TECH ? At a recent gathering of a.t. people in Oregon I noticed an immediate uncomfortable shifting in seats when the question of a. t. and poor people was brought up. I've noticed similar uneasiness surfacing whenever people haven't quite had a chance to sort out their ideas on a potentially sticky subject. It is also often related to residual (or active) feelings of guilt. Why do we get so defensive about the relationships between .alternative technologies and the low income? Perhaps it is time to open up the proverbial Pandora's Box for discussion. Since my own evolution into working on RAIN and a. t. issues in general comes from an early ir1volvement in urban ghettos in the '60s, it's a problem that has been part of my consciousness for as long as I remember. I am hardly alone in expressing the feeling that .I had begun to feel distinctly uncomfortable working within that milieu both because I wasn't black in the days when that was becoming increasingly important and because I had seriously begun to doubt whether I had anything more than bandaids and good intentions to offer. This was true even in the ,days when I was working with community design centers making available architects1 and planners' services to design day care centers and to fight urban renewal. At least then we were offering a service that people ' had requested and obviously needed, yet it always felt like we were only doing cosmetic work. Even when we were successful in helping to block a freeway expansion into a neighborhoop, the sense of power that ·we generated in the area was always shortlived compared to the debilitating powerlessness caused by the welfare system and the lack of jobs. I always felt that we ,were learning and growing more than the people we were trying to help. And so I, like many other people at the time, removed myself more and more to dig into my own head and to learn new skills in what I thought was a totally different direction. I have a strong memory of a mentor of mine speaking scornfully of students who were beginning to get into ecology. His implication was that the problems of the earth were cop-out, middle-class stuff compared to the life and death issues of urban blacks. I also remember the disgust with which many blacks greeted Martin Luther King's beginning involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement. How could stopping that war have any relevance to the hungry children the Black Panthers were trying to feed? Thus when I began the shift away from direct anti-poverty work I felt a twinge of guilt that maybe I was only moving·on to something that was easier for me than struggling to make a difference in that alien world. • Our sense of the problems was so fragmented in those days. We didn't see that the degradation of the farmer's life and the move towards large-scale agribusiness was a major part of the reason the blacks and poor whites were pushed into the cities in the first place. We hadn't yet documented the connection between the corporation's push for bigger and bigger profits, the exploitation of poor people all over the world, and the exploitation of our diminishing resources. It had not . even dawned on us that our resources were diminishing. It has taken a long time for 4s to fully realize that the costs of pollution, increased mechanization and higher priced energy would most hurt those who can least afford it. The poor get it coming and going as prices rise and unemployment worsens. I should have known that things would be coming full circle. Wee.re only just now beginning to realize that the skills and information we have been developing over the past five or six years are more than ever directly relevant to the problems of the poor. Work on solar colkctors, urban gardens and credit unions along with the documentation of corporate ripoffs can be an important means for beginning to shift the balances of power that have held the majority of the poor in their place for so long. The realization of these connections has recently been coming from within both the a.t. world and the more traditional anti-poverty circles. But viable and productive relations between haven't always been (and still aren't always) possible. Since much of the research and proselytizing of alternative· technologies of all kinds has been done by predominantly .. ~hite, upper ~iddle class long-hairs ahd forrrier long-hairs, 1t has had a kmd of unreal, hippy/back-to-the-land appeal that has turned off most of the urban, real poor (as opposed to the voluntary poor). Helga Olkowski tells a story of proudly pulling together a group of community action people on the fir~t NCAT Board to watch t;,he Canadian National Film Board's movie on the New Alchemists. She thought this would really pull the ideas together for them and was horrified when they furiously demanded to know what relevance all those hippies running
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