The Personal Politics of Hopelessness
As I write this I'm eating a sub I bought from across the street. While it was being prepared I chatted with the young woman making it, and she told me about moving from the Canadian Maritimes to Toronto, to, in essence, get a job that pays a little more than minimum wage. Because out in the Maritimes she had trouble getting even that.
I thought to myself that her experience is one that politicians need to have. Many politicians, of course, have never ever had a bad job. They went straight to a good university and from there to a good job or internship. They probably worked hard for it, and think they deserve what they have, never really seeing all the people whose feet were never on that road, who never had the same shot they did.
Then there are a fair number of pols, though less and less every year, who will tell you about the lousy jobs they had as teenagers, or maybe in their early twenties. But in most cases something is different between them and many working class and even middle class folks.
They knew they weren't staying there.
When I was poor and working in lousy jobs I used to look in the mirror and see myself at 50, or 60. I expected to still be working at grindingly hard jobs, being treated badly by bosses (because there is no rule more iron than that the worse you are paid the worse your employer will treat you), and still being paid little more than minimum wage. That was the future I saw for myself.
And when I was on welfare, after having failed to find a job for 6 months, and even being turned down by McDonalds (in the middle of the early nineties recession) I wondered if I'd even ever have a shitty job again. I ate cheap starchy food, turned pasty and put on weight. My clothes ran down. When my glasses broke beyond the point where tape would keep them together I literally had to beg the optometrist to make me his cheapest pair and I'd pay him later. (I eventually did.) My life was a daily grind of humiliation.
And that's what I expected my life to be.
When politicians participate in one of those "live on Welfare for a week/month" programs I'm happy, but I'm also dubious. The difference is that they know they're getting out in a week or a month. They know it's going to end. Much as I applaud someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, who lived for months working at lousy jobs, again, she knew it was going to end. She knew that, if push come to shove and she became seriously sick, she could opt out. She knew that if she really couldn't eat for days, that was her choice.
Living without that safety net, knowing that if something goes wrong, that's just too bad, changes you. Living without any real hope of the future, knowing that the shitty job you've got now is probably about as good a job you're ever going to have, changes you.
And it changes your sense of what hard work is, of what it means to be deserving. I remember working on a downtown construction site as temp labor, and I'd watch all the soft office workers with their uncalloused hands come out for lunch, and I'd wonder why they got paid two or three times what I did for work that was so much easier (and which, of course, I could do, even if I didn't have a BA.) At the end of the day they might be stressed, but I'd go home physically exhausted from hard labor and so would my co-workers.
Of course, I got out of that. I'd say "I went back to university", but even though that's true, it's not what got me out, since I never finished my BA. Instead what got me out is that I finally got a couple chances to prove what I could do--I got a temp job in an office, and was one of their most productive workers (they measured it.) Later I got invited to blog, and hey, I can write, even if I don't have a BA. I got lucky. Like most people who get lucky in work, that luck involved a lot of hard work, but it also involved luck.
But a lot of folks never get lucky despite the fact that they work hard. Perhaps they aren't really all that bright (half the population, after all, is below average intelligence.) Perhaps they've got some personality issues or weak social skills. Perhaps there's something not quite right in their brain chemistry. Or perhaps they just never catch a break because they aren't lucky and their parents weren't well enough positioned to help them get those breaks.
But still, most of them work hard and earn their money, whether it's barely more than minimum wage or they did get a bit of luck and got one of the few remaining good blue collar jobs.
But when they look in the mirror, they know that the guy or gal looking in the mirror ten or twenty years from now is probably going to be doing the same thing. And they know that they're one bad break away from losing even the little they have--one illness, one plant closure, one argument with their boss.
They don't have a lot of hope for the future, except that it won't get worse. The life they live now is the best it's probably gonna get.
Living like that changes you. It makes you see people differently. You understand that there are a lot of bad jobs out there, and that someone's going to be stuck with them. You know that most of those jobs are either hard or humiliating, and often both. You know that for too many people, a shitty job where they're abused by their boss is as good as it gets.
This all came to mind because of how Congress and other politicians have acted throughout the debate about helping the auto companies. Folks who passed a bill giving their sort of people: wealthy people who went to good colleges, who work with their minds and not their hands in the financial industry, 700 billion dollars without any real oversight wanted to force a cram down of wages and benefits on auto workers. Journalists on TV who were sympathetic to the bailout, dripped with palpable contempt for the idea of "subsidizing unprofitable companies", something that didn't bother them when it was soft-handed professionals like themselves on the dole.
The narrative of the GI generation was "first person in my family to go to college". They came up from poverty, they probably expected to live in poverty all their life, but when the world change so changed their chances.
It was a generation of opportunity, but what has happened since them is the "closing of the American elite". Every generation the odds of someone born poor making it into the elite decrease. At this point about 80% of the working class don't get degrees. The US now has the least intergenerational social mobility in the Western world (it used to have the most). The elites have become self-perpetuating, and they never had to stare in a mirror and know that they may never have more than minimum wage job; that probably this is as good as it gets.
As a result they have no real empathy or understanding of the vast majority of the middle and working class. The elites know they worked hard to be where they are, what they don't see is that their feet were put on the path from birth, and that every opportunity was given to them. Opportunities that were not so open to those below them, who have to virtually bankrupt themselves to go to university and whose schools were completely broken, even as the value of BA declines to multi-generational lows. Put yourself in debt for 20 years, and it may still not buy you the good life.
That existence, hand to mouth, with no hope, is something America's elites have never experienced and don't understand. For them there's always another opportunity, always another chance: always hope. And what matters to them is when the "deserving", which is to say, their own class, is in trouble. So they'll bail out the financial sector, even though it hasn't made any more profit than the Big 3 in the past 8 years, and unlike the financial sector, didn't bring down the world economy, but they won't help out the undeserving whom they don't understand.
America has become the most class ridden society in the Western world, far worse than Britain. Congressional seats are passed on to family members and friends like corrupt boroughs in 18th century England. The rich are bailed out and ordinary people left to sink. Responsibility is enforced on the least in society while the privileged are allowed to skate. Sell a gram of pot, go to jail; but kill hundreds of thousands in an illegal war and it's no big deal.
The elites don't live in the same world as ordinary people. They have become completely disconnected from that world. This is entirely logical on their part, because for 30 years they've gotten rich, rich, rich at the same time as ordinary people haven't had a single raise. When you're sitting on the top it's very clear that all boats don't need to be lifted and that Americans aren't all in it together. The elites have done just fine, for over 30 years, while the rest of society went to hell.
So there's no empathy born of shared experience, of the knowledge that sometimes life sucks and no matter what you do, it's going to suck, and that that's the way many people live. And there's no acknowledgment of a need to make America work for everyone, because for the elites, that's simply not true: America doesn't need to work for everyone for things to be good for them.
This then, is how they've acted. Plenty of help for themselves, for the people they see as part of their group. And very little help for everyone else. Because the elites aren't like ordinary people, they don't believe they have many shared interests with you, and they no longer have any real shared experience.
Expect to eat a lot of cake over the next few years if this attitude doesn't change. The elites, of course, are wrong. At the end of the day a nation without a solid working and middle class always falls into steep decline.
But, as Adam Smith once said, "there's a lot of ruin in a nation."
Nonetheless, as many nations have discovered, that amount isn't infinite.
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Unfortunately I don't think the average politician recognizes how expensive it really is to be poor, and how difficult it is for most people even with a fairly well-paying job to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps".
The poor pay higher interest rates and late fees, are gouged by sky-rocketing overdraft and NSF charges, payday loans, predatory ARM mortages, the list goes on... if the Horatio Alger myth was ever real, it's certainly dead now...
http://lux
Wow, this is a fabulous article and so completely dead-on. If only our body politic were people with real experiences in the main stream. It's so corrupt now with both sides of the aisle.
Not that many here are likely interested in new classical music, but I wrote a bit about this inspiring article and how us folks in the arts, often have our artistic approaches affected by deep tribulations.
http://net
"That existence, hand to mouth, with no hope, is something America's elites have never experienced and don't understand. For them there's always another opportunity, always another chance: always hope."
He's almost missing his own point. Hope is a mind set not an accident or luck. Plenty of people otherwise well off feel just as hopeless and just as stuck in their situation as people with nothing. Being in the middle class or having a college education doesn't free you from feelings of hopelessness or bad/underpaying jobs. It doesn't even free you from financial insecurity and the risk of losing everything over nothing.
A brilliant column by a real person,not an overcreden
Wow this was deep. I got chills. Thank you for sharing your personal experiences with us, and delving into territory that makes us so uncomfortable, because everyone would like to believe our society is a meritocracy.
There is one thing you touched on the end that has been on my mind but I have not articulated. How it seems like it really does take the rich getting poor to declare a state of emergency. I have just moved to New York and I am so disturbed by the homeless people begging for a living each day. As I watch CNN I sit and wonder, is there a set amount, or group of people for whom suffering is acceptable, and action should be taken only when previously undisturbed populations begin to suffer as well? It seems like an unstated rule.
I am an actor, so I am use to instability in employment. It's surreal to watch everyone else hopping from job to job too. On a hyperbolically larger scale, I wonder if the homeless and downtrodden laugh to see us crumble under the weight of a condition that is their daily existence. Will people learn empathy after this is over?
I honestly think there are politician out there who got onto the game for good reasons... it seems to me that once you are inside the machine, something happens, maybe it's redtape, maybe greed, but there are good people out there really trying to make things better. I think people need to start taking on more personal responsibility. Do the small things... like smiling at strangers, holding the door open for someone or offering them your seat on the bus/subway.
I know how I must sound, but I believe it really can make a difference.
Yes, some got lucky and some didn't. It's wrong to attribute to hard work what was mostly luck.
So far we agree.
We likely disagree on how to create an environment where others not so lucky can get a leg up. Welfare ain't it. it creates dependence that wrecks the soul and wreaks havoc on families.
Progressives like the image of Evita throwing money from the train at the poor. What happens the next day?
During the campaign, poor Mr. Obama tried to quote JFK (who said "a rising tide lifts all boats") and he bungled it (Obama said "When you lift all boats, the tide will rise"). Unwittingly, he described the problem with his policies, and the difference between liberal and conservative thought. Sorry, I think JFK was right.
See Ian Welsh's Profile
JFK was a liberal. For 30 years the rising tide has not lifted all boats. The bargain has been broken. What liberals want to do is make it so that when the tide rises, all boats do rise.
I made no suggestions about solutions in this piece, though I have elsewhere. I think my suggestions are mostly things JFK would approve of. He didn't preside over some Reaganesque laissez-faire country, nor did he want to.
"A rising tide that lifts all boats...." has been sunk by these same elites discussed that don't know how to legislate.
JFK said that to support his tax cuts.
He's no hero of mine particularly, but his brand of liberalism was far saner than what it has become. I have not noticed ALL boats rising no matter who's in charge. Today's policies see to want to drain the harbor. I guess all boats will be the same level then (except for the yachtmasters.
Mr. Obama perfectly fits your description of elite. He is the elite of the elite politician class, actually.
He and the rest of those elites will always be wealthy because they are the elite class.
They will block anyone else from becoming wealthy however. Two classes: the elite, and the rest of us.
The mixed child of a single mom raised in a minority controlled state is a member of the elite?
Hogwash.
His single mom didn't really raise him. She decided to go work on her doctorate degree, and turned him over to the grandparents, who were fairly well off. They sent him to cushy private schools. Then he was off to ivy league schools, and then to an internship.
I don't know what you mean by minority controlled state. Hawaii? Growing up in a mixed race society comfortable with all hues of skin is quite different than some places minorities grew up.
Elite? Quite.
Just because someone went to Harvard, doesn't make them elite. It is passed down, generation to generation, like wealth.
The White red staters will always vote against class interest when race is thrown into the mix.
This is sad but true.....
The blog is on point but what he failed to mention is that fact that mostly poor whites consistently vote against their class interest when code words for race are thrown in. The red staters in places like W. Virginia where some people are poor as dirt still went for Mc Cain knowing full well he did not have their interest at heart. Whites have been doing this dumbshyt since the time of the revolution when the indentured servants had the same interest as the black slaves but, were given a little tabacco and told they were better because they were white. The people in red states just could not see themselves voting for a Black man. When we get 10 million whites locked up for non-violent drug offenses wil the drug laws change. When we have 100 milliion white kids uninsured will we get health care reform. Unitl then since this country is majority white and majority red states, the status quo will continue.
Marx said " A society of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
Some would say that poor blacks consistently vote against their "class interest" as well--why keep voting for the same people for generations who keep you down (the consequence of the welfare program-intended or unintended? You decide. The direct result of it has been to wreck the black family, and to condemn the men to the streets- and prisons).
What I'm saying is that you attribute to race (bad white people) something that isn't really about race. Some of us disagree about how to sustain a healthy middle class (comprised of all colors) and how to reduce poverty. But most of us want that.
Its about class, not race. You two will never get it.
So..umm you read the Moniyhan report once in 1965 and just checked out for the past forty years? I mean really your comment is so simple and devoid of thought or analysis. You know some people disagree with him right?
....Oppres
Nothing he said about white voting patterns was incorrect.
Ian Welsh hits this topic spot on. While I eventually managed to get through college, thanks to the GI Bill, I spent most of my life in poverty. Half of my siblings remain poor. I have never met a polititian who had to struggle to make it to where he/her has gotten. At any rate, they have short memories (maximum 6 years) and go about talking talk, forgetting action that counts once elected/reelected. In my mind they are the worse goatheads of all, and should have to go back to trying to subsist on minimum wage for at least one year out of every seven.
Thank you, Ian Welsh. It takes guts to admit to be being on the receiving end of economic injustice and more guts to do it in a way that is free of the taint of self pity. You bring to mind Jack London's MARTIN EDEN, along with Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck. This voice must be heard, loud and often. We need a thousand like you.
Just think about how many brilliant minds are sidelined and marginalized by American social mores of cronyism, patronage and oligarchical elitism. Socrates, in Plato's Republic, decried the very same social injustices for his time. When the rules for social justice continue to be defined by those that feel entitled merely by birthright, without regard or input from all that have a stake in a society, then there is no social justice.
Good story. I enjoyed reading it. although, I got more and more morose reading it. lol. I have made Pillsbury Microwave Pizzas on an assembly line, have worked at Taco Bell, even worked as a cocktail waitress (where my major goal was becoming a bartender, it seemed much easier). People working for minimum wage really ARE knowing that their future looks just like their past, and it ain't all that great.
I became a nurse at 40 years old. I still only make 13 dollars an hour, but its sure better than 7.00 an hour. Kids growing up in small towns, whose parents work for low wages, know that they can expect the same thing in their own life. Its depressing as can be.
"Congressional seats are passed on to family and friends" It is true and the same case in many parts of the world whether it be a democratic, socialist or communist country. Politicians have a sense of entitlement and you always wonder how they sleep at night when their constituents are barely scraping by.
Just tonight my fourth grade daughter selected The 2002 World Book of Records for our reading time. Under the category of "Fame and Money", on page 43 (a coincidence?) was a picture of George W. Bush under the heading "W MONEY". It stated that W "has assembled the wealthiest cabinet in American history by appointing more millionaires to the top rank of his government than any of his predecessors. Of the 16 full cabinet members at the heart of the Bush administration, 13 are millionair
I've had enough cake, thank you.
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