I Love America

Uncle Sam is a folk Character who is said to have grown from Sam Wilson, a real life, butcher that lived in Troy, New York in the mid 1800's. Grocery stores and strip malls, the bowling alley and the bus stop all hang out the Uncle Sam shingle in the post -industrial city, that once was among the wealthiest in the developing United States. Troy proudly lays claim to being the official home of the patriotic red white and blue spangled character, who is said to represent our country. Children have screamed "I Love Uncle Sam" at his annual birthday parade on the Sunday closest to September 13th for the past 20 years. In these moments of frenzy when The Uncle Sam Chorus croons God Bless America, the fact that there is conflicting evidence that a real Uncle Sam ever existed seems unimportant. Faith in the ideology that Uncle Sam personifies is what gives him life. Maybe we always see the best in our lovers out of gratitude for our having something to love. Like religion, the believing is what is sacred. Conflicting time frames in the history of the photographic process have given historians cause to debate the validity of the only Ambrotype image that lays claim to bearing Sam Wilson's image. No one has ever seen a picture of God either, yet we work to keep in Favor.

Sociologists, who study the same industrial capitalism that cities like Troy were the prototypes for, agree that it is the ideology of an egalitarian society that perpetuates a two-class system. "The great beauty of Capitalist production consists in this" wrote Marx, "That it not only consistently reproduces the wage-worker as wage -worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capitol, a relative surplus population of wage workers. The idea that there needed to exist a certain degree of compliancy on the part of the working class to whom this system was unfair has been explained by the wage workers belief in the ideology that they could aspire though hard work to ascend class and become owners of industry. In fact, as the use of technology increased in production the amount of capitol that a man could amass from his wages in proportion to what was needed to advance his economic situation and own his own business decreased.

There is no industry in Troy today. Most jobs there are in the service economy and very few privately businesses are still operating, with even fewer opening anew, and the sirens and whistles and cheers grow even louder for beloved Uncle Sam and the home that he calls "the greatest country there is!''

I Love You

To say that love is a factor in social inequity is a radical thought, too anecdotal, unquantifiable and fallibly human to be taken into consideration by those who set public policy. The most liberal social programs distribute love through bread and cheese.

For the past twenty years I have been reporting on poverty in The United States as a symptom of National Ambition and an integral part of Industrial Capitalism. Troy, New York, is The City that I have been obsessed with over the past seven years. Troy is the city that was the birthplace of The Industrial Revolution and held most of The Country’s initial wealth and hence became a symbol of American Ideology. Troy is now a post -industrial City, among the poorest in The United States, with single female heads of household the population that has the largest percent below the poverty line.

Low wages, pre dawn drives to work, long, bleak, grey winters, jail visits to son’s and baby daddies, sparkly thong underwear from Wal-Mart, Sponge Bob, coffee, cigarettes, kids and love making – lots of love making is the landscape of Trojan Women

When I am in Troy, I have a room at the YWCA, The "Y" provides shelter for homeless and abused women and a place where low-income females can live until they can find apartments. My wages as an independent photojournalist and single head of household, qualify me for this kind of housing. Rooms at The YWCA are meant to be temporary, though some women have been there 20 years. Immediately after getting the key to my room I felt that I too would never leave and I needed to call my son so he could reassure me that he would care for me in my old age. I became aware early on in my reporting about Troy, that the role love plays in the lives of women lower on the economic scale, is far more complicated than for those women with a wider array of distractions. The need for love is concrete and desperate, yet the lovers are often disposable. The women at The YWCA haunt me and have driven me to look further into love as a life force straddling the energy of birth and death, destruction and redemption for women with limited physical resources. For the women that I have grown to know and love, here at The YWCA and in my reporting in Troy, love is akin to travel – an escape from the grind of a future with limited promise or a weekend get away from a life of toil already misspent. The drama of a tumultuous relationship can preoccupy, indefinitely a girl with unrealized ambitions. Women at The YWCA tend to have lost their loves – either through death or abandonment or attrition. To these women romance is the best medicine if only in small doses of unrealized fantasy. One women there who was in her sixties and had been badly burned asked me to photograph her nude so she could send it to her boyfriend down south – she had been waiting years for him and “get her” so they could be married. Another woman, a widow had been dating on the internet and fell in love with a man who sent her a handsome photo of himself, along with a story about how he was a minister in African and wanted her to send him money for a plane ticket home so they could be together. Being outside of love, leaves a woman for whom belonging is a concrete asset, vulnerable- it diminishes her self worth and can manifest in physical and emotional homelessness. Love here, is not a choice but a rescue mission. Young girls become entwined with young men who have limited options due to jail or employment or lack of self -esteem and they forfeit a painful future of possible disappointment in service to their men – and female desire has to crystallize in the bedroom.

The quest for love is an avocation handed down through generations and perpetuated in fairytales and pink plastic Barbies and generic bride dolls and Britney Spears. The feminization of poverty in American has been commercially legitimized and its emotional deficit filled at the Dollar Store.

There is a discussion rarely had when speaking about teen pregnancy or single motherhood or the feminization of poverty. Such loft social terms ignore the very core of emotional footing that is a woman’s presence in the world. Love among the poor becomes legislated and is judged as a moral issue with the focus on the burden to the public from an ensuing pregnancy rather than examining the disadvantage a woman may have been trying to leverage. Insurance companies in America conduct studies about the life expectancy of their customers and it is a fact that married people live longer and healthier. The YWCA is only five stories high and women rarely walk the stairs as it exhausts then. The vibrancy love brings, awakens in women a renewed attention to self and caring for her self if only to attract or preserve it for another leads to better health and productivity. Love- new love has been scientifically proven to stimulate the endorphins- similar to a cocaine high- complete with feeling of well being and euphoria. I have also seen love entrap due to religion or a sense of duty. Poor girls have fewer financial options so make choices that will leave them the least at risk for physical resources like food and housing.

Love may be the most political force we know.

Brenda Ann Kenneally
Brooklyn, New York
October 10, 2010