Changing Classes: Joe Bageant Knocks It Out of the Park Again
Sharon July 21st, 2009
You’ve got to read the whole thing, but Joe Bageant’s essay on our society’s shifting class status, and the pain and suffering that accompany it is stunning, and utterly, appallingly accurate.
If in my travels and experience in American life I see that tens of millions of Americans being screwed silly by a handful of chiselers at the top, or if I see one percent of Americans earning as much annually as the bottom 45 percent of Americans, then that 45 percent is an underclass. When I see a 70 year old man on his second pacemaker limping through Wal-mart as a “greeter” so he can pay at least something on last winter’s heating bill this month, then he is part of an underclass. When I see the humiliated single mom waitress tugging downward on the ridiculously short red plastic skirt she must wear at the Hooter’s type joint so her crotch won’t show, she’s part of an underclass of humiliated and socially oppressed people. Screw the hairsplitting about who qualifies as underclass and what color they are. Just fix it. Or reap the consequences.
We’re finally starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass in this country. Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it. Frankly, I hope they do. We’ve got room for them. All the lousy, humiliating jobs have not yet been outsourced. The Devil still has plenty for them to do down here.
Call all of this anecdotal evidence. You won’t be the first. I was on a National Public Radio show last year with a couple of political consultants, demographers as I remember. One, a lady, was obviously part of the Democratic political syndicate, the other was part of the Republican political mob. The Democratic expert said dismissively of my remarks, “Well! Some people here seem to believe anecdotal evidence is relevant.” Meaning me. I held my tongue. But what I wanted to say was this:
Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There’s no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need. We can see the guy next door who’s drinking himself to death because, “I never did have a good job, just heavy labor, but now I’m all busted up, got no insurance and no job and it looks like I’ll never have another one and I’ve got four more years to go before Social Security.” He doesn’t need scientific proof. He doesn’t need another job either. He needs a cold beer, a soft armchair, some Tylenol PM and a modest guarantee of security for the rest of his life. Freedom from fear and toil and illness.
And furthermore, Sister, we cannot see much evidence that other, more elite people’s scientific analysis of our lives has ever benefited us much. When you’re fucked, you know it. You don’t need scientific verification.
I wanted to say that on the radio. But I didn’t. The little white guy mojo voice in my head told me not to. So I just laughed good naturedly. Like any other good American.
May God forgive me.
This is precisely what is at stake for many of us – getting to know the kind of degrading poverty that leaves you isolated, miserable and afraid (and I can say this because I know exactly what it feels like to have someone deal you an eviction notice, or to take a job that involves humiliation and shame as part of the work description) – or finding something better, not just for us, but for the people who are already living this way.
It isn’t a small or easy thing to deal with. But there are ways of making it better than this. We have failed to do so out of the goodness of our hearts. It is my hope we may do so out of fear of joining the underclass.
Sharon
Do you have link to this essay?
It is in the essay, EJ, where it says “read the whole thing” and has a hyperlink.
Sharon
Joe Bageant is a treasure.
I want to be nice and I dont wanna rant, honest.
I am 1/2 white and have lived straddling the white “world” with white supremacist relatives (all gunned up since the 50s, continuously) who I consider entitlement monkeys (tho they wont see it this way) and a brown non-american world that has been seriously f*cked with by the US gov for more than a century.
I hold no allegiance or patriotism or nationalism in my heart for any gov or movement. I also do not expect to EVER have the $$ or SSI to retire (I actually never did have that expectation).
I was “gifted” with a sense of middle class from my mother who grew up in a poor but then-middle class white world while also being simultaneously gifted narratives from my father of a world and history that was imbued with violence and deeply convoluted US subversion such that even walking in the street would have gotten you shot by freelance roof top snipers.
I can promise you that the concept of class is a mental device instilled in you to keep you in your place. Further, I can also promise you that if you are worried about falling into a lower class, you are already there and likely never had a chance of “climbing out.”
Its a construct and its not helpful. Its what most of us inherit and do so without ever examining it. I know because I have been examining it and how “being middle class”, being a wage slave, being professional class, “being” these things are all externally imposed and reinforced constraints that have been internally re-enforced by my own unfortunate dogmatic thinking.
I have had to intentionally shake off the white entitlement ethic so as to escape it’s illusions, ones that will not help me care for my family.
For me, transition is about releasing attachments. Attachments to consumerism, retirement as envisioned for the past few decades, attachment to infinite growth, attachment to a scientific career that was asymptotically upward in progression, attachment to other middle class accoutrements. I sure as h*ll dont need to be suffering from attachment to class!
I think you have a very good point, Nika, about the concept of class. It does serve to keep us striving for a ‘place’ in the heirarchy. And as long as we know our ‘place’, and stay there, the status quo remains unchanged. But of course, now that a lot of us are being shaken from our little niches that we thought we were sitting so comfortably in, we are all just a little worried. I too have been too poor to pay the rent, had the heat turned off in the winter (with three little children to keep warm), and have had not a bite to eat in the house (and too proud for food stamps – pretty stupid, really!) That was a long time ago, but it really affected the way I see myself (made me a lot stronger and more confident) and I think I’m a better person for it. But I was young and life was ahead of me, and I didn’t stay in that dark place. I would hate to be in that situation now, but I know that plenty of people are finding themselves there, and that it could easily happen to me again.
I remember a comment that George Bush, the first, made during his inaugural speech (I believe), something about ‘the common people’. I actually had just voted for the man, but I was so incensed by the referral to us as ‘common’ that I never liked the him after. As if he really were superior to the rest of us!
Nika, class is a construct, but so are a lot of things that meaningfully affect people’s lives. I had some ID stolen recently, and I had to go into a situation where you are supposed to ahve valid ID without any. It was disturbing (the cost of not getting away with it would have been high for me, but I also know that the reason I got through was entirelyl based on race and class – had I not been white, had I not spoken in a particular way, had I not pulled out the full stop s of my “I’m a good middle class citizen, help me, don’t punish me” – and had the capaicty to do that in a host of ways – I wouldn’t have gotten through, and it wouldn’t have had a smlall cost, it would have been a big one. I’m not sure how useful it it to observe that any construct that we have to function with in some measure, is simply a construct – so’s money. That doesn’t mean deciding not ot deal with it will get me anywhere.
My hope is that fear of becoming poor will motivate a measure of soildarity with the poor – because I honestly don’t give a flying you know what what motivates it – we just need it so bad.
Sharon
Oops, sorry for all the typos – for some reason I can’t see what I’m writing – there’s a problem with site admin.
Sharon
I’m not invested in the whole “class” construct, it seems pretty silly to me. We are all human beings.
Of course there are differences in education and income and wealth and career paths and lifestyles and cultural values and etc. These differences do matter. The fact that I had to put several things in that list, though, should be a clue that things really are not a matter of simple bifurcation into us/them or haves/have-nots. Rather, the population is a rich tapestry or quilt; even that doesn’t really describe it, for those are only two-dimensional, and the various combinations which describe each person are multi-dimensional. Things really are complicated when it comes to understanding people, both individually and collectively.
If one begins with the assumption that the US must inevitably be forced to live within the means provided by its only renewable resources, then the logical consequence of that would appear to be that our per capita GDP must inevitably become much lower than it is now. I seriously doubt that a US economy that is anything close to what might reasonably be called sustainable can achieve a per capita GDP of anything more than about 25% of what we have at present, and even that is being pretty optimistic.
What that means is that just about all of us are going to be getting much poorer. Not just those unfortunates who are sliding into the “underclass”; those are just the pioneers, the “early adopters”. No , it is not just them, but everybody.
Best start accepting the inevitable reality now and getting used to it.
Sharon,
I understand what your saying re: solidarity but I doubt that fear of being poor will give rise to solidarity with those who are already. More likely it will just stoke more aversion to those who are living their worst nightmare. People would naturally tend to avert their gaze than embrace the pain.
Understanding that something is a construct can be of use to those who mistake class as part of their core identity. Its about awareness raising and the beginnings of deconstruction of the shells of identity that we clad ourselves with.
Kat,
re: Bush – wow, that must have been a hard moment! I never had to be disabused of any sort of appreciation for the Bush family so I totally didnt even notice that comment.
Your experience as a young mom is a powerful one and illustrative of so much. I am glad you came out of that experience to share it all these years later. As a young girl and young woman, my biggest terror was having kids because I knew I could not cope functionally with just the experience you relate. I waited until I was 30 to have kids (after grad school) and I have learned a huge lesson – one can only prepare so much and control so much – I have 3 young kids, am old, and I still worry about how to keep them warm and fed this winter!
Nika, I don’t think that having class as part of your identity is necessarily a bad thing – for example, many American small farmers have class deeply ingrained in their identities, and I think mostly in productive ways. I think having *affluence* as part of your identity is bad, although sometimes useful – but I know a lot of people who have a great deal of pride in their lower class identity, and for whom the traditions of that class – frugality, rejection of useless materialism, etc… are valuable.
I agree with part of your point, and I do think that to some degree, there will be minute class distinctions that allow the newly poor to have contempt for the old poor, etc… but I also think there’s more fungibility in our history that is of potential use than you are allowing – it is no accident that the Great Depression fueled America’s greatest labor and class movements in history – that is, the experience of being impoverished did precisely move people to care about the situation of the poor.
Sharon
You know, I don’t consider any job humiliating. If it gives you the income to get by and maybe even improve your lot a little so you can move to the next, slightly better, job, then you are ahead of the game.
I’ve worked many jobs in which I was insulted, forced to wear unpleasant “uniforms,” and perform menial labor. Somehow, I managed to climb upward – because I was determined to do so. And, yes, anyone can do it. I went to school and worked. I worked and went to school. For years. I finally graduated into a respected profession and worked and went to school for that Master’s and then the PhD. I have worked since I was 16. I’m now 66, and despite nearly total disability, I continue to work. There is no job too menial or too humiliating for me to perform – just jobs that are physically impossible for me anymore.
You people need to develop a work ethic that goes beyond race, class or job title.
Get ready for a depression that will make the 30′s look good. Plan to work hard at whatever you can get – and learn to enjoy it. That will be the rest of the decade and even through the 2020′s.
So Elizabeth…not to sound antagonistic, but I’m curious: Did you ever have to work as a prostitute? Or in any sex industry job?
No, Elizabeth, not anyone can get a PhD – and if everyone could, not everyone could be employed in high-status jobs, so you would just have a nation of janitors and short-order cooks with PhDs. Most of “us people” do have a work ethic, thank you, and if you are a regular reader here, you should know that lots of Sharon’s readers have “learned to enjoy” hard work and dirty hands. Most of us would agree that no TASK is humiliating, but humiliation is a hominid social function; what makes a JOB humiliating is not the physical demands or the inadequate pay, but the fact that you have to grit your teeth and smile when someone who imagines himself your better publicly degrades, belittles, or abuses you. I suppose it is a utopian lib’rul fantasy that people ought not to subject one another to that kind of treatment. I also have experienced poverty and been to grad school, but the conclusion I drew from that was that I should have sympathy for those who never escape the poverty-level jobs, not hold them in contempt for obviously not being as “determined” as me. You may have become A Success in American terms, but you seem too bitter to be enjoying it much.
What Dewey said. I would tend to expect a person who’d spent that much time at school to be able to grasp the distinction between the work being humiliating and the treatment that goes with the work being humiliating. It isn’t a complex logical distinction.
That said, I also think there are some kinds of work that are inherently degrading – I don’t think most manual labor falls in that category, and I don’t think you’ll find that this is a site that demeans manual labor in any sense – I’m a farmer. But I do think that the sex trade, and the peripheral sex jobs, whether wearing inadequate clothing at hooters so drunk guys can grab your ass or having to strip for them, because you can’t find a decent job that doesn’t involve humiliation that pays well enough, is inherently humiliating, and you can’t clean it up by talking about the nobility of work.
Sharon
hmmm class issues- this is interesting indeed. I do believe that “class” plays a major role in so much of American life for sure: not sure about other countries. It ends up affecting so much of what we do- where we go to school, the jobs we take(or don’t take), the homes we buy, how we furnish them and landscape them, out social group- the concept of class and where we see ourselves or want to see ourselves.
What is “middle-class” anymore btw? I would guess that there is a financial category that is considered “middle-class” but that many who consider themselves to be of that class are not really by those standards. Who wants to consider themselves “lower-class” anyway?
We form certain constructs regarding what people are like- on the basis of their jobs, income, housing, cars etc- and people are in general loath to do anything that would place them in a class category that they don’t wish to be found a part of.
I think I am very confusing to may people as
in terms of educational level, interests, etc I am solidly “middle-class” but my income puts me into lower-class- and probably my car and home as well….. and as for jobs- what do they do with “organic farmer” anyway? Although I notice that if I am teaching as an adjunct, which I do occasionally, that gets more respect……
Recently I was attending school for a few weeks away from home- training for a new career- and I couldn’t afford to stay in the dorms or hotels- so I camped at a campground- for 2 weeks of solid rain- and after 1 week I moved into my car instead and slept there- that made my classmates sorta uncomfortable I guess- they were all staying in dorm rooms or mostly hotels – no other tenters or car-sleepers….. class issues rearing their ugly head perhaps?
The funny, or not so funny thing though was that one of my classmates,a very stuck-up doctor, was particularly critical of me and nasty as anything- I am guessing that she assumed it was ok to act like this as I must be poor or something. And when she was missing some items from her desk-she went over to mine to search for them- as if I would take her stuff……. guess people poor enough to sleep in their car wouldn’t hesitate to steal from their classmates?? I know this says more about her than it does about me- but I also know that this is where those currently treading water in the “middle-class” don’t want to go. They don’t want to be handing over the EBT card to the clerk at the register, or going to the food shelf, or sitting in waiting rooms applying for medicaid or other assistance. They don’t want to be judged and found faulty, a lesser form of human and all the other ways we tend to look at the lower-class……
So I’d guess they will keep on doing what they’re doing until they can’t do it anymore(to paraphrase Kunstler) in a vain attempt to keep from becoming one of “those” people…..
I have never grasped the concept of class as understood by U.S.ers. It seems to have something to do with money (old is better, but lots trumps that), how long your family has been in the states (long is good, too long (i.e. before 1492, bad) what color your skin is (I don’t have to spell this one out), what other part of the world you ancestors came from (if any) and how big a fish you are in your local pond.
In England, at least one was able to know where to sort the grandson of an Oxford don who is a selfmade man in the City whose father waa plumber vs. a pop star whose father was a Rural Dean who was the son of a marrried duke and a housemaid (also married, but not to him).
I would never offer any other defense of the system, but the system in the US seems to have nothing to do with seating people at dinner parties, but a lot to do with how people feel about themselves.
MEA
Class used to based on education and profession as well as money. Middle class meant someone who was educated and professional or owned a business. Then there was the working class! That’s not pejorative but has totally dropped out of use. I think that calling factory workers, no matter how well paid, “middle class” disguises the fact that they are not the masters of their fate.
Thanks for pointing to the Bageant column, Sharon, that’s a good one. I think he’s the most under-appreciated writers in America today.
I’ve worked at a variety of job since the 50ss, and I’ve got to say, the class system has gotten much worse since then. Used to be that a blue collar family could live pretty well, with security and respect. There was also pride in being a working person, and people weren’t so brainwashed. Unions used to make a big difference.
It’s hard to convey how much things have changed.
Bart Anderson
I may be off-track with this conversation, but the thought that struck me as I was reading the article was that if America had fewer single-person households, we could reduce the number of people who fall into the “lower class-poor” category.
I am amazed by the number of people in the 50+ category who live alone – for whatever reason. I remember my widowed grandmother taking in boarders to pool their resources for each other’s benefit. And what’s with all the single gents in their 50s-60s-70s who choose to fall apart when life fails them? Why do they prefer to live in their cars or run-down places when there are so many widows also living alone who would appreciate having a handy-man around to live-in and help out?
As America gets grayer, the number of single person households will increase, thereby leading to more “statistically poor”. It’s time to look for roommates. folks!
Cathy, you go, girl! I noticed that in my neighborhood, there are a large number of family sized houses with one senior living in them. Seems like a waste. The senior is often lonely, the house has to be heated, the other bedrooms are only occupied if family is visiting, often the house is in need of maintenance. And heh, heh, often there’s a sunny spot that could be converted from lawn to vegetables.
The guy in Wal-Mart was still alive and still working. At least he could. We are a rich society. We could afford to give the guy two pacemakers, if not retirement.
A guy who would be dead in half of the world’s societies has a job which involves a lot of human contact. Said job probably keeps him going in more than the financial sense. This is so unfair, unjust and just wrong? Perhaps. We die when we stop being needed.
The social arrangements of my childhood may yet come back into fashion, where old men with families babysat and annoyed the daughters the in law that they lived with and old men with no families lived in rooming houses. For thrills they played dominos in the park on Sundays. Ancient history in a big city in the 50′s.
Shira
I’ve always lived in shared housing (if you count my childhood home as shared housing), and it’s a great option for me. But, to be honest, if I were an elderly woman I’m not at all sure I’d wanted to invite a man my age or older to move in — not sure the trade off the taking out the garbage and changing lightbulbs (or even installing shelves) is worht having to later nurse him though his last illness as I outlive a 2nd man would be worth it. If he were a master plumber, perhaps.
In my experience, older men living in their their cars are mentally or have adiction issues or both.
Having said all that, I think that Cathy is right on the button that we’ll see more and more doubling it, and it better to do so pro-actively than reactively.
I grew up in the lower class in the South, white and female. Blue-collar Dad, non-union, living in a falling-down Reconstruction-era farmhouse on my grandparents’ dying farm. I was almost prohibited from making the valedictory speech at my high school (despite being top in the class), until the student council and most of the top 20 stood up to the principal on my behalf. I got a standing ovation from an estimated 3000 people; poor kid in a wealthy district voted “most likely to succeed”.
I have been in the class people seem to fear joining. It really is not so bad, if you have people around you who care, and a river clean enough for fishing, and a backyard big enough for a decent garden. Prevention helps, as in eating as well as you can, and cleaning your teeth because you cannot afford to fix them when they decay. My ancestors generations deep lived almost without cash, in houses you wouldn’t let your dog explore, and they were not (for the most part) miserable people. Urban poverty is a lot worse than rural poverty, and I know that, but we may need to relearn what our ancestors knew about cooperation, and survival, and the importance of family to meet the challenges out there.
I think the “class warfare” stuff is a smokescreen to keep us from communicating clearly, to keep us blaming and complaining rather than learning and helping. My classmates were willing to stand up for me, despite our differences, and I hope others will be willing to do the same for each other in the future.
Anybody who doesn’t think that class isn’t a MAJOR factor in the US has been comatose for the past nine years. George W. Bush was a drunk until he was 40. His 20′s were a series of political posts to Harvard, Yale and the National Guard. An acquaintance of mine who went to Harvard with Bush and then to Vietnam as an Army captain says he was dumb as a stump then too. The man’s IQ didn’t break two digits and it’s doubtful that he had any idea what was going on around him. The only reason he was elected was because his “class” refused to let the paid media criticize him. Look what happened to the paid media.
As somebody tossed to the curb by medical problems I can tell you that education does not help very much. Doctor’s appear to hate informed patients with a passion and the “safety net” is more of a compost pile. It’s designed to toss you to the street for the slightest, inevitable, error in the reams of paperwork they force on you. Try filling out 10 pages of forms when you’re in pain and your blood sugar has bombed.
Those elderly single women living alone like it that way. I know more than a handful of them and they have their pensions, houses, social groups and little dogs. They have no intention of sharing their 2000 sq. ft houses with anybody. If that means that others die in the street they are ok with that. It has it’s problems: two of my mothers elderly yoga students died recently as there was nobody in the house with them to notice they were sick.
If anybody doesn’t think that elderly women living alone in three bedroom houses while families with children sleep in shelters isn’t wrong I don’t know what is. But it’s class distinction right there. We’re a broken people.
Cathy, I’m with you – but I think that runs across the board – class is shaped by the assumptions that come with it. Don’t live with your parents too long – that means something is wrong with you, don’t live with your children, you don’t want them to be dependent, don’t live with your siblings – there’s something wrong with you if you don’t want to get married. Don’t share space after marriage – even though there’s too much work for two adults with jobs and kids, don’t share. The deep, deep isolation of our society makes us poorer in so many ways.
Sharon
Joe’s recent book “Deer Hunting With Jesus: Notes From the Frontlines of America’s Class War” , as well as his web site http://www.joebageant.com are worth a read. America has never been, and wasn’t designed to be, egalitarian.
Hear, hear, MD! My parents were both poor kids living in rural Kentucky during the last Depression, but they don’t remember the poorness. They had plenty of food from the garden, milk from the cows, and eggs from the chickens. Extended family lived nearby, and frequently, with them. My father’s grandmother, a survivor of the Tolliver-Martin feud, lived with them until she died when he was 10. He slept in her bed with her (a common practice back then, as both beds and the space for them were limited) and he was bereft when she died. Everyone worked, but they had fun, too. All of my uncles on my mom’s side could play several stringed instruments and, boy, could they rock the house! I know that because, as adults, they would all get together at my mamaw’s house during the summer and play, and everyone would sing late into the night.
And MEA, it isn’t always how long your family has been here. I am a descendent of George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, founder of the state of Maryland. We’ve been here for a good, long time. But some other branch of the family must have inherited the fortune!! We just inherited the love of growing things – I think I have dirt running through my veins (or maybe mud :=)
Wonderful piece, and fabulously interesting commentary. I feel so fortunate to have read the article, Sharon’s thoughts, and everyone’s responses. Great!
wow – all I can say.
Sharon, I too hope for a world where people finally understand the real meaning of “love your neighbor”. I doubt though that even fear of becoming part of the underclass is going to do it – the middle and working class in America has been losing ground for several decades now while the wealthiest control more and more of the nation;s wealth – and yet – those same struggling middle and working class families let themsleves be distracted by endless “culture wars”. Now it will be race – cause nothing diverts people’s attention away from class like race. The old Dylan song – Pawn in the Game – I am paraphrasing but – you may be poor – but at least you are white.
Pangolin — just to pick up on the elderly women living alone who won’t share their houses — we had such different visions.
You saw what you described.
I saw someone with a small house or apt. (1 or 2 bedrooms); more or less managing on a fixed income, faced with the prospect of taking in and supporting a older man in exchange for the sort of chores her husband used to do …
I wonder what gave us such different ideas? I wonder what Cathy had in mind?
Kat, you many not have inherited the family fortune, but you do have an ancestor with a colorful past.
I worked on a maternity unit as a nurse’s aid for 8 years. I was a single mom and it was a pretty good job. Flexible hours and, although low pay at first, I was able to get a good wage toward the end of my time there. But my son still qualified for medicaid.
As a nurses aid, the work is the grunt and yuck of the nursing hierarchy. I’ve wiped plenty of butt in my life. When a patient vomits all over the bed, the nurse calls the nurses aid to clean it up.
I’ve also seen some very sad lives: woman losing children to social services because they could not leave their abuser, babies addicted, women with mental illness having babies, and plenty of single mothers, plenty of teen mothers.
Before each shift begins, the nurse from the prior shift would record a report for the next shift on patient history of the day. There I was writing the information I needed to do my job when the highly educated nurse call her patient “another scumbag”. Why?
Because she was a single mother on welfare.
I was a single mother on welfare when I had my son. It was the only way I could afford to take a leave of absence in order to have him. I remember when I had my son, at this same hospital, ( before I worked there) that I had felt a bias as a patient because I was not the “right kind” of mother.
When the nurse was confronted she could not see that I was just like these women that we served , Or that given different circumstances that she cold find herself in a similar situation.
There is an amazing account (of course I can’t find the info to cite it) of pro-life women who chose to have an abortion and think their circumstances are such that they (yes, I’ve lost control the number of person) and only they deserve one, while everyone else is still a murderer.
On a similar note, I’ve often felt I am the only parent who is entitled to feel exaspereated with her children because everyone else has 1) easy children, 2) an involved father, 3) more money, 4) doesn’t have an outside job, 5) does have an outside job, 6) has children older than mine, 7) has children younger than mine — pick any depending on the circumstances of the day.
Its very hard to see other people as just like us…or at least as deserving of compassion as we are.
Which brings us back to the question of what will help us prevent more people ended up in need — which is what the label underclass is, as I understand it, mean in this case?
We can’t avoid people falling on hard times, but we can avoid stigmatizing them for it. Poor as we were in my childhood, we helped other families worse off than ourselves on a regular basis. My dad would pick up discarded air conditioners and appliances, and refurbish or combine them to give away. Mom took food often to a family poorer than we, and organized toy drives at church for inner city kids. She took us along to help with delivery, even when we were quite little. We learned not to judge people by their clothing, or how they smelled, or where they lived. Instead of teaching our kids to cling to stuff and status, and to think certain tasks are “beneath” them, we should instead teach them that bad events happen, and sometimes you can’t afford Christmas presents, and sometimes other people come and bless you, and sometimes you bless them. With that attitude, no matter what comes, we can survive together even if we are not rich, and our needs will be met because we all help each other.
“If anybody doesn’t think that elderly women living alone in three bedroom houses while families with children sleep in shelters isn’t wrong I don’t know what is. But it’s class distinction right there. We’re a broken people.”
I’m curious to hear: what should be done about this, then? Should old women be forced to house poor families? Should old people be moved out of their homes they’ve lived in all their lives for the sake of fairness (after all, people with children need the space)? I mean, I agree we need more low-income housing, but the idea of mandating that someone share their home because someone (who? the government? a local tribunal?) else thinks they have too much of it, is not a world I’d care to live in, frankly.
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