A couple years ago I watched the first couple episodes of Undercover Boss. If you don't know the plot of the show, well they put the CEOs of hundred million or even billion dollar companies "undercover" where they go perform the front-line jobs of the employees that make them rich. I actually only made it through like the first two shows.
In one the CEO of a billion dollar waste management company rides along with a woman driving a truck. He wonders why she pulls a tin can out of the trash. She explains she is going to urinate in it, because management keeps increasing the number of stops and she doesn't have time to pull off her route to use a bathroom.
They cut to the CEO who is dumbfounded as he admits pushing through the increased routes was his idea, and he didn't realize something like this would be a side effect.
In the next a CEO of one of the largest theme park companies spends a day with the guy (worked 20+ years for the company) that cleans the bathrooms. He asked the guy if he'd like to have dinner. He says after working an 8 hour day he can't, he has to go to his second job. Asked why he is working two jobs he explains the company cut his health insurance and he can't afford to care for one of his sick children on his salary.
Again the CEO was dumfounded. I couldn't watch it anymore; it made me sick to my stomach.
Well this weekend my DVR started to record Undercover Millionaire, cause I guess it thought I might want to watch it.
It is even more depressing if that is possible. They put super rich people into low income communities and have them do community service. All the folks are stunned there is so much poverty just a few miles from their gated communities.
A personal story below the fold and why this "bubble" our rich live in is such a problem in our society...
Before I moved back to rural Illinois I lived 15 years in DC. Most of my friends and co-workers lived in Reston or Herndon. Some in Great Falls and even Middleburg. Those are some of the richest cities in the US. And with Great Falls and Middleburg you don't so much have a house as you live on an Estate.
I/we worked and shopped in Tyson Corner.
Now for those that don't know Route 7 and Tyson Corner, in strip malls there they don't have dollar stores. They have Orvis (a fly fishing/outdoor store) and REI. There isn't a Ford dealership. Instead BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. In the malls you don't have JC Penney. Nordstrom is your "low end" place. Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus are where most folks I knew shopped. Stuff like LL Bean for kids and Apple stores.
Sure there is a fast food place or two. But not so much things like TGI Friday's, instead you have Ruth Chris and Sam & Harry's. Wealth that would choke a horse.
Now I grew up in small rural towns. So if I was living in the DC area, well I was going to live in DC darn it.
In the mid-90s I bought a house in NE DC. Third Street. A block from H Street. Two blocks from Union Station. 3-5 blocks from the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Heck the US Capital.
When I bought the place, well it was in the "hood." Now it is "yuppie" central. I hear my house would now be worth about 4 times what I paid for it.
Going to work in the morning I often had to side-step homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk. If I went to H Street to buy a six-pack or really anything, all the transactions were done through bullet proof glass.
I recall the day I moved in, about 8 PM I was done, I walked towards H Street to get a bottle of wine to celebrate my first house I owned. The 76 year old African American women that lived next door said to me:
Son, as a white boy you got no reason to walk in that direction after dark.
She was right. It wasn't so safe. In the six years I lived there I was mugged twice. My house broken into. My car broken into. My girlfriends car stolen and never found.
See there were (and I assume there still are) places in DC where if you go a few block in this or that direction, you move from affluence to abject poverty. It wasn't always "fun" but I didn't mind it so much. I worked with others in the area, like that neighbor of mine, to make the place safer. You know, community!
I tell this story because it was close to impossible for me to get any of my co-workers to come to my house. At least when I lived in DC area if you said you lived in NE or SE that was "code" that you lived in the "hood."
I could offer the men I knew free hookers or the women free Coco Chanel hand bags and they wouldn't come out of their NOVA (Northern Virginia) bubble (don't mean to stereotype either sex BTW).
And here is the problem. These folks, most of them moderate if not liberal, lived in a bubble where they never saw a "poor" person. They never talked to them. I'd argue to some level out of sight, out of mind.
Where they live, where they work, where they shop, well things are all kind of OK. Great even.....
So when a politician talks about poverty. That millions, heck tens of millions of children are hungry, they have no frame of reference. We've tiered off our society where you don't even have to witness poverty or despair. So when folks ask for help, I think most don't even understand how dire the situation is for millions.
The fucking bubble needs to be broken. We've created a society where those with means almost never have to encounter anybody that don't have means. Where to many a "poor" person is like spotting a rare "wild animal." Something you see on TV but don't experience in real life.
I will now come back to those two reality shows I mentioned at the start. At many levels I don't feel sorry these folks are so clueless. But in all honesty I think they were truly touched by the experience. That once outside their "bubble" they saw the world was not what they thought.
I don't know how we do this, but we need more of it.