I can hardly leave the house without being appalled.
The other day I stopped at a discount grocery store. There was a tall thirtyish man there, wearing a tee shirt that said “My Dick: the gift that keeps on giving.”
I felt like saying to him “Uh, dude, if you’re wondering why you can’t get a date…” but thought better of it.
I surmised from his manner and the venue that he was a working class guy, probably without prospects, as they say. I am almost daily confronted by the evidence of the degradation of the working class: the preponderance of single mothers and shack-up couples in my neighborhood, the shiftlessness of the young men, the growing signs of creeping poverty.
I love the working class, but it drives me crazy that they spend what little money they have on tattoos, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. And it drives me crazy when I consider that thirty years ago most of them would be like the clean-living, hardworking, churchgoing folks I grew up with.
Don’t get me wrong; there is plenty to be critical about those times, and of merely conventional morality. But even a shallow conformist morality spared the children of a prosperous working class a host of afflictions.
Not that my dismay is limited to working class woes. From time to time we visit a sort of natural foods supermarket in North Canton. They have fresh peanuts and a grinder, and for around the same price as corporate peanut butter you can get something so tasty that it hardly seems to belong to the same species. And it is the sole source for various herbal remedies and salves that we use.
But when I see the affluent customers, trim and fit, pushing their carts filled with exorbitantly priced organic food, which may not really be all that organic, it gives me chills. It isn’t hard to foresee a future where the elite alone can afford good food, where only the rich or near-rich are healthy.
And it isn’t hard to foresee a future where only the rich are educated. The days when parents counseled their kids to take out loans for education, believing that it would pay off with better jobs, are long gone in the wake of a generation stuck with huge debt by age 22. And to say the least, wages have not at all kept up with soaring education costs:
Just today, USA Today reported:
The gulf between the richest 1% of the USA and the rest of the country got to its widest level in history last year.
The top 1% of earners in the U.S. pulled in 19.3% of total household income in 2012, which is their biggest slice of total income in more than 100 years, according to a an analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics at Oxford University.
The richest Americans haven’t claimed this large of a slice of total wealth since 1927, when the group claimed 18.7%. The analysis is based on data from Internal Revenue Service data.
I don’t know what will happen; there are good things going on as well. Urban pioneers are organizing community gardens in Cleveland and Detroit and Youngstown. Fast food workers are agitating for a decent wage. There is a growing consciousness about the systemic economic injustice in the US.
But it may be too little, too late. Walmart, the largest criminal enterprise in the world, continues to rake in profits, mainly from the very working class it exploits. There is very little political threat to the corporatocracy, which owns the system. Even most workers are blissfully unaware, “happy” if they can afford a few tattoos and a cell phone.
But unless something radical happens we are heading for a new serfdom, where the masses serve the masters.
Serf City, here we come.
Great Piece Dan.
Serfs Up !! Life’s a Beach !!
Great point too about at least a veneer of Conventional Morality often sparing the working class from many ills that afflict them now.
The rich are very often insulated by their money from the same mistakes that take down those in humble financial circumstances.
Just for a glimpse. Go to traffic court. Look how Joe six pack standing solo before a judge is treated compared to to Johnny Silver Spoon who is flanked by well dressed parents & an attorney.
It only gets much worse for more serious offenses. Consider frat boy W, a drunkard & cokehead in his younger days. Had he been caught in a police drug enforcement policy net without money & connections like the one he instituted while Gov of Texas, he would have been ruined for life in our brutal prison system. Etc, etc……
Today I cried when I saw a tshirt at my public university that said “Make love, not babies” (from Abercrombie and Fitch). Should be the motto of the sexual revolution. I’ve never seen it stated quite so blatantly on the street though.
Everywhere I go outside the “little Catholic bubble”, children are seen as an evil to be avoided at all costs, unless you feel like you want a personal accessory at some point much later in life. It’s partly because of money — they won’t be able to afford their Whole Foods peanut butter if they have children.
I hear this from people my age all the time (~30. “ew, who would want children? I’d rather have a dog.”)
Then I read this blog about tooh-ties, and my faith in humanity is strengthened!
Could we maybe not use the purchasing of organic food as a signifier of decadence? I’ve always bought all organic stuff and I never made more then $20,000 a year until my early thirties. Now I buy all organic for myself, my wife and my three children on a $45,000 salary that I work 80 hours a week to make. As Dan said, the lower class spends money on smokes and alcohol and lottery tickets, unless they’re more interested in health like I was then they spend that money on Whole Foods peanut butter. If people today spent the same portion of their incomes on groceries as they did 75 years ago almost everyone could buy all organic all the time. Shoving off the externalities of the cost of food production onto farmers, farm laborers, and the people who live down stream of the farms that produce your “cheap” food is not a simpler, humbler way to live.
Let me tell you about the working class I know:
My husband is a mason in a rough crew of tattooed, cigarette-smoking, hard-working, hard-partying guys. Guys who check out girls from staging and complain about the cost of their all-natural greek yogurt. Guys who work second jobs selling guns at Outdoorsy stores and then worry about the morality of selling guns to guys who don’t respect women; guys who work third jobs at late night bars because they can’t cover the cost of their truck payments. Of course they have tattoos – ask them about their tattoos sometime and you’ll get an earful about the beauty of evolution they’re attempting to display with that full sleeve, or the tribute to a sister who died of cancer, or the faith they’re working on with Jesus. Or, ask our tattoo artist – a working class man with five kids and a farm in the country where he raises free-range chickens, pigs, and hope-filled, home-schooled kids on next to no income. Ask him why he loves tattooing, why he doesn’t consider beautifying the bodies of his clients a waste of time and of their money.
And no let me tell you about the clean-living, hardworking, church-going working class I grew up with. The men who borrowed at interest from my grandfather to cover the bills after they lost at the races or drank away their paychecks Friday night, the uncles who couldn’t attend a wedding without causing a drunken fist-fight, the men who walked out during every homily to have a quick drink at the bar across the street, and the fervent union thugs who beat you up if you crossed the picket line.
Don’t idealize the working class, past or present. We’re people. We love tattoos, cigarettes, the chance to be a winner – at the track or at the lottery. But don’t demonize us either, we eat organic too – and we clean up pretty nice: sometimes you can’t really tell if that trim, fit customer pushing her little cart through Whole Foods is really affluent, or if she’s just a working stiff who doesn’t like shopping in her construction hat and paint-splattered jeans.
Speaking of the demented crass attitude that is becoming more accepted among all classes though, what should a man or woman of honor do when faced with the kind of anti-social behavior exemplified by the T-shit Dan saw? I really don’t know how (or if) I should deal with it. A while ago I saw a guy in Walmart with a shirt that said “I support single mothers” with a silhouette of a stripper on a pole. I tried to work up the nerve to confront him and tell him what a jerk he was to put that in face of old ladies, young children, and of course single mothers. Basically I was spoiling for a fight, assuming anyone who would wear that in public would have a bad attitude. While tried to psych myself up I noticed that he seemed to be acting pretty non-aggressive, and at one point he walked a little close to me and said, “Excuse me.” That made me reassess my assumptions and my attitude, and I thought maybe I should approach him a wayward brother rather than as a threat to decent society. Then I thought maybe I am being totally condescending and I should leave it to the people who know him personally to call him out – I’ve never taken kindly when strangers thought it was their job to tell me to get a hair cut or shave my beard. Besides refusing to spread the crassness and telling our children and friends what we think of it, should we even do anything? I don’t think this is just a question of aesthetics and bourgeois acceptability, it really is part of a devolution that makes life harder and less beautiful, especially for the working class and the poor. (Though I agree with mashagoepel that the past working class had its own major moral failings and at least where I am from I don’t think things were a whole lot different just 30 years ago. I always thought it was maybe pre-60’s, not pre-80’s, when poor folks had conservative morality.)
Yeah, you can go to Whole Foods. But if you want to support a living wage *and* get prices the working class can afford, go to Winco! Mine has a peanut grinder too, and a great bulk foods section.
I didn’t mean to idealize the working class of my youth. There certainly were a lot of problems, and humans are sinful, period. Still, going to church, living responsibly, and not cussing in front of women and children were the norm. Not today; family dysfunction and not going to church are normal for the working class. As is the dearth of jobs that pay a living wage. These things are not unconnected. Most people do not transcend their environment; thus most morality is purely conventional. Before the late 60s few would dream of living together outside of wedlock. Now that too is the norm.
I rebelled against conventional morality when I was young, and scoffed at factory jobs (though I worked them, briefly). Now I see that even conformist morality is better for the common good, ie, for children in particular, and see the 50s and 60s as a golden age for workers.
And I didn’t mean for my comments about tattoos to disrespect anyone. It’s just that I never dreamed that it would be common to see people so heavily inked that they only would have been found in a carnival sideshow when I was a kid.
I’m not working class but it seems to me that a working class family would not feel welcome in most mainline Protestant or Roman Catholic churches. Back when I was Catholic, I knew a priest who would say things like “we Catholics are poor…” and I’d think “what???” Our little suburb has been hit hard by the recent recession but you’d never know it from the local Catholic Church. It’s very middle class, respectable, etc.
Putting mortality aside (and if they’re not welcome in church where would morality come into this), why should a woman marry a man who cannot support her and her children? Why should she legally commit herself to a man who is probably going to be a burden to her financially. And why should this same woman, who probably has few prospects herself, let the lack of marriageable men keep her from doing the only good, worthwhile thing she will ever do, have a child?
+1
The other thing that is not unconnected to this is the sexual revolution. It was not just poverty and bad jobs that created this; it was also the disrespect for human life from the upper classes that the only good poor fetus, is a dead poor fetus.
Conservatives like to point out that people who get married before they have children, and don’t divorce, etc., do better economically. I think that’s true, but it doesn’t mean what they say it does. It doesn’t mean that if poor or working class people just got married, automatically jobs at just wages would sprout up for them. No, it means that decades of wage stagnation, plus relentless propaganda on the part of the media for sexual freedom, have produced a
degraded culture. Here’s a quote from a recent article about research done by Sarah Corse of the University of Virginia”
“`We need to think about how income inequality affects other types of inequalities,`” Corse said. “`It’s harder to choose to get married, or to sustain a marriage, if you the lack resources that many educated, middle-class people have.`”
“One of the people Corse’s team interviewed was Cindy, a middle-aged woman who’d spent her whole life in the same small Ohio town. Cindy told the researchers that when she was a child, her father had a stable manufacturing job and her family lived comfortably.
“But by the time Cindy married, those jobs were largely gone, and her husband could not find steady work. He eventually deserted her, and she was left as a single mom with a minimum-wage job at a convenience store. Her daughter, now 20, never finished high school and lives with Cindy and Cindy’s boyfriend.”
Can someone show me the logic in saying that “working class people are fat slobs spending money on tattoos and cigarettes” while “those awful rich folks are trim and fit and eat organically” (while crushing the poor under their heels)?
And here I’ve been blind all this time to the apparent conclusion that I must be a member of the infamous 1%, since I choose to spend money on a healthful lifestyle for my family. But no… I’m pretty sure I’m not a billionaire so I must have overstepped my bounds. Sorry, didn’t mean to get so uppity…better go out and buy some lottery tickets, get tatted up, and start behaving as I apparently should be with the rest of my people.
You make it sound like I am being mean. But statistically, working class and poor people are more likely to be overweight, to live together outside of wedlock, to not attend church, to be divorced, etc. Working class women are the only social class in which life expectancy has declined.
I am not the only one to note the decline of the working class. Many conservatives flatter themselves that this is because the affluent are morally superior, but I hope I don’t have to convince you that this is not true. It, as Tom points out, is directly related to the scarcity of good jobs, combined with the depravity peddled by (the rich) media masters.
This is not to say that there are not working class folks who try and live healthily, go to church, etc. Sheesh, man, I am a blue collar worker, don’t smoke, worship, garden, etc.
I’d imagine that at least in some areas, e.g., north-east Ohio, lots of the working
class whose economic prospects have deteriorated were Catholics, or at least
that their parents or grandparents were Catholics. If the Catholic subculture had
not been destroyed in the 1960s, there would still be some community which helped give some semblance of meaning and community to them. Yes, of course I know that that subculture was not perfect, and also that it functioned
as well as it did because of the good blue collar jobs that were available at the
time. But it would have helped with some of the difficulties that afflict the working class today.
Writing about Syria in my blog recently, I said. . .
“Me, I say it’s time for spiritual warfare, full on, no holds barred, rosaries and novenas and processions with waving signs and banners and icons, ringing bells, incense smoking, and dowsing them with holy water. Followed right on with multiple random acts of goodness, beauty and kindness. Also. . . Even more carefully planned and implemented structures that propagate goodness, beauty, and kindness.”
Someone just sent me this New York Times article on marriage and the class divide. But the article avoids discussing the wage question, i.e., wage justice.
Both justice and chastity need to be addressed, at the same time. Unfortunately
I have little hope that either will be addressed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&
That’s an interesting article. I think the connection between chastity and justice in the gay marriage debate has been sorely neglected, especially be opponents of gay marriage. For one thing it further commodifies the family, so that the spousal relationship is just another adornment of life that anyone can purchase (and dispose of) IF they can afford it. And opening marriage to same sex couples undermines the purpose of all the subsidies and protections that civil and private society provide to spouses. For a gay couple, in which children are also an optional adornment and not a natural product of the relationship, we can expect that both partners will work full time unless they are so wealthy that they can afford to procure a child and to have one partner take up homemaking and child rearing. In that case there is little reason to provide spousal benefits of any kind – let the spouse earn his or her own benefits. Speaking for myself as a small business owner, we’re finally of a size where we can offer very basic health coverage to our couple employees. As we grow I’d like to extend that to family, but not to live-in girl friends or boyfriends and not to same sex spouses for just that reason – the employer may have some duty to provide for the dependents of his employees but not for other adults who can provide for themselves.
“And opening marriage to same sex couples undermines the purpose of all the subsidies and protections that civil and private society provide to spouses.”
Exactly – the only reason that historically cultures and commonwealth’s have been interested in marriage and created safeguards for it was because it was
where the next generation was begotten and raised.