I want to write about the plight of everyday Americans in the current economic climate. One angle I don't read much on here is the mental or psychological angle - the toll that simply being less than wealthy can easily take on people. I grew up working poor through the Reagan years, and experienced the grinding sense of knowing that my president hated me and my family because we had been born into the circumstances into which we were born, rather than, by some happy accident, being born scions of wealth, of industry, or of political dynasties. Hated.
I quote a good deal from "A Question of Class," by the amazing Dorothy Allison, whose work I often assign in writing courses.
From A Question of Class
by Dorothy Allison
But what may be the central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she had me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved ... I have learned with great difficulty that the vast majority of people believe that poverty is a voluntary condition.
This is what it is to be poor in America: To be held in contempt. To be served up contemptuous stares by those not so financially unfortunate. To be the Other; the be Them.
In my case, I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa - birthplace of Michele Bachmann.
I never met her people, but then, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks - the East Side. Mine was a mostly black neighborhood, and everyone knew that the West Side was home to the good neighborhoods - that is the wealthy, mostly white ones, with many big, newer homes, while the East Side was run-down, dangerous, and poor.
As I said, everyone knew these things. The whole town was divided into an East vs West rivalry, one marked by East High-West High football games that in past years had led to racially charged riots.
I want to say this about my family: We were born into this. And while, As Reagan said with that big, charming smile of his, it is possible to pull one's self up by one's bootstraps, even metaphorically speaking, it's damned hard. (Ever tried it for real?)
Besides, you're not supposed to leave your socioeconomic demographic. Everyone knows that.
...
In Greenville, everyone knew my family, knew we were trash, and that meant we were supposed to be poor, supposed to have grim low-paid jobs, have babies in our teens, and never finish school.
Life as a poor person is like that: People born fortunate sons and daughters have silver spoons, new clothes each school year (usually more frequently than that). The consumerist programming was so entrenched in the minds of my classmates from middle school through graduation from high school that people used to brag about how much they spent on an outfit. Jordache - or whatever brand name was inexplicably all the rage and stupidly expensive at the time? Ridiculously expensive shoes were a huge point of pride; guys in the locker room after gym would have wardrobe-cost pissing matches. I can't tell you how many times I heard one of the haves say to another, "Man, my shoes cost more than your whole outfit!," as though this were the most desirable thing in the world. Because it was.
They had learned that spending more than one wishes to on shoes, for example, was to be applauded - a frankly stupid embrace of wasting money and resources. And gods help the not-so-wealthy kids who came to school in store-brand tennis shoes.
The ridicule was endless.
Being poor meant that one was worthy of contempt and, worse, worthy of public humiliation. For having the nerve not to be born into circumstances in which they, too, could spend stupidly on the designer label du jour.
...
There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze us in. There was an idea of the good poor—hard-working, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. I understood that we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. My family was ashamed of being poor, of feeling hopeless. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed.
Then they are poor because they don't help themselves -- right?
That was the myth during my childhood and young-adult years: A person who doesn't have a job "just doesn't want to work," we were told. To our faces. Michael Moore managed to get some country-club types to say so on camera. My father's profession, iron work, dried up when John Deere automated, replacing thousands of workers with robots. Those thousands had been part of an older social contract: They worked hard at a good job, earned a living for their families, got by and maybe saved enough for a little vacation for the family once in a while. Then they retired with a package they could count on.
Automation changed that paradigm. It was inevitable, but it was like unloading two barrels into Waterloo's chest. The economy began to struggle as those thousands suddenly arrived in the local workforce, and the ripple effect began choking the supply of money being spent in the area. new construction dried up - and there went my father's profession. We faced other problems - my mother's permanent back disability removed her from the workforce altogether, for example.
My brother and I delivered papers, and became the secondary breadwinners in the family. Our father took what jobs he could get.
Always, there was the heckling. Eddie Murphy doing a routine in which kids heckled other kids for being on welfare. The wealthiest always convinced that one could only be less than wealthy if one deserved it.
The judgment handed down by total strangers: A message that said, simultaneously, My child will go to college because we can afford it. Why don't you go to college and do something with yourself?
Except that you aren't supposed to do that. Everyone, unfortunately, "knows" that. In my neighborhood, we watched as fathers and mothers worked at what jobs they could, turned to drink and other substances to confront their shame at not being able to do better, and sometimes wishing for a better life for their kids. And then we kids grew and watched with wonder at the possibilities the world held out for us: Becoming a physician! A businessperson! Going to college, and so on.
But then reality began to set in, and you could watch as the kids from my neighborhood began to realize that not only weren't they going to be able to afford college, but often they were not actually going to leave the neighborhood. Sons turned legal to drink and took seats alongside their fathers at the neighborhood tavern and, when the fathers died, took their seats over.
I watched the life and the hope drain out of people my age as we moved first into 8th grade, then onward. Watched as that realization set in, and the child's wonder lighting their eyes went dark.
I watched as experimentation turned ever-more risky. Pregnancies unintended and unwanted. Trying a joint becoming being caught with a scheduled substance in an era of increased mandatory drug sentencing. How important can high school seem when, all at once, you see the truth of what has been handed to you, and at the same time see the lie of a promising future that had been dangled before you, as well?
What does one feel when the rug is yanked out from under him before he gets a chance to get his feet off the ground?
Shame. Anger, at one's self and one's circumstances, perhaps diluted with confusion because, seriously, what kind of world would do both of those things to its children? How fair could anyone think that was?
All piled on top of the hegemonic belief that, somehow, this is what fate, or God, or whatever, had in store for them anyway.
Add to this the fact that once those kids saw the truth, they no longer either tried to climb forth from the circumstances into which they'd been born, nor could encourage other to keep trying. Thus, not just wealthy society and the assumptions that "everyone" knows, but also the attitudes of one's own people, one's own friends and family, also began to collude to keep people right where they were.
The attitude that finds the poor to be lazy bites especially hard when the economy weakens and refugees from the middle class begin to become poor, as well. As the masses of have-nots grow, the people with the wealth and the power, who find poverty contemptible and worthy of blame, attack what's left of the social safety net.
Nothing like the ones in charge of one's own society telling an entire class of people that they do not deserve even to go without losing jobs, homes, or health care, that they do not even deserve not to starve to death, to generate anger, protest, and riots. (Just ask London.)
And, if things continue that way, revolution.
---
My aunt Dot used to joke, "There are two or three things I know for sure, but never the same things and I'm never as sure as I'd like." What I know for sure is that class, gender, sexual preference, and prejudice—racial, ethnic, and religious—form an intricate lattice that restricts and shapes our lives, and that resistance to hatred is not a simple act. Claiming your identity in the cauldron of hatred and resistance to hatred is infinitely complicated, and worse, almost unexplainable.
...
I knew without asking the source of [my cousin's] rage, the way he felt about clean, well-dressed, contemptuous people who looked at him like his life wasn't as important as a dog's. I knew because I felt it too. That guard had looked at me and Mama with the same expression he used on my cousin. We were trash. We were the ones they built the county farm to house and break.
... I found myself remembering that afternoon long ago at the county farm, that feeling of being the animal in the zoo, the thing looked at and laughed at and used by the real people who watched us. For all his liberal convictions, that Sunday school teacher had looked at me with the eyes of my cousin's long-ago guard. I felt thrown back into my childhood, into all the fears I had tried to escape. Once again I felt myself at the mercy of the important people who knew how to dress and talk, and would always be given the benefit of the doubt, while my family and I would not.
I experienced an outrage so old I could not have traced all the ways it shaped my life. I realized again that some are given no quarter, no chance, that all their courage, humor, and love for each other is just a joke to the ones who make the rules, and I hated the rule-makers.
...
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others, a secret core of shame for the middle class, a goad and a spur to the marginal working class, and cause enough for the homeless and poor to feel no constraints on hatred or violence. ...
I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.
I've written and read a bit lately about people giving up after trying for three years to find employment; about people trying to get by without a paycheck, and helping, along with others, with what little wisdom we can about getting by when you're destitute -- I try pitching in about our garden (in no way a solution that helps immediately), and with recipes that are cheap and healthy. Others give advice that's great if you can afford to employ it; buying things in larger/bulk portions makes sense because it's cheaper per unit, but is difficult if either one cannot store the bulk-bought goods long enough to keep them from going bad, or if the bulk package is, ironically, too expensive for a person with little money. (In this way, it becomes quite expensive to be poor.)
I have read again and again from people who are ashamed because all they want out of life anymore is to wake up in the morning and go to work -- and they cannot do it because the jobs just aren't there.
And I don't know what to tell you, apart from this: It isn't supposed to be this way. My scant wisdom isn't enough, and it isn't supposed to be this way.
The redistribution of wealth from the least wealthy to the most wealthy has continued for years at a pace that alarms observers from other Western nations.
Somehow, that programming to Consume! Consume! Consume! has become so set in the stone of so many Americans' minds that they find even Social Security, which people have generally already paid for throughout their entire working lives, to be some sort of contemptible handout. And the debt-ceiling compromise, which places the burden of budgetary cuts squarely upon the shoulders of those who can least afford it, while the forces for the wealthiest an the corporations engineered things so that the wealthiest do not pay even a dime toward the same compromise, tells the bottom 98 percent exactly what the corporatist rulers think of us.
Recall the attitude of billionaire hotel owner and real estate investor Leona Helmsley when she allegedly said: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."
Remember that when you consider the plight of the very wealthy, thanks to George W. Bush and, now, the Tea-Party-driven GOP.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/...
You decide when the redistribution fro the have-nots to the haves has gone far enough.
You still have your vote. As diluted as it is by the electoral college, by gerrymandered districts, and by voter suppression, you still have it. But it is becoming more diluted, now, by the sudden legal decisions making money "free speech," and allowing unlimited corporate dollars to be spent influencing elections.
But the rest of the world is watching us in horror at what we're allowing ourselves to become (as linked above).
Don't be the people Dorothy Allison mentioned, especially in that last excerpt. One's prosperity need not be built on the ruins of others' well-being.
Check yourself out from that set of programmed attitudes. Don't embrace that nonsense from either the perspective of the haves or the have nots. No good can come from that dead end, and far too many of us have already swallowed that whole package of lies.
Don't fall for this programming. Don't buy this propaganda, or drink their kool-aid. And don't allow yourself to be ashamed for being sacked by a corporatist system that sucked, and sucked, and sucked money from the economy until your job disappeared. And don't fall for it; don't treat others who've experienced that same squeeze from the very wealthiest few as though they somehow deserve it.