
Photo by the wonderful photographer Vivian Maier. Newspapers all seem stunned that she, a proletariat AND a woman, was actually good at something. Quick, someone write a human interest story!
Today, I am going to make a feeble attempt to discuss a
subject that has dogged me for my entire life: classism. I’d like to preface
this post with the disclaimer that I haven’t read much about classism, I’ve
never taken a course that covered it. I think this is primarily because my
entire life is a big ole exercise in dealing with classism, so I avoid reading
about it in my spare time. (Like most of the working poor, I instead spend my
spare time fantasizing about all the ridiculous shit I'd buy if I were rich.)
So I suppose this post is just as much about my own attempts
to sort out my feelings on the matter, as it is to promote discussion.
I’ll start with my own experiences, since they’re one area
of the topic where I consider myself an expert.
I grew up poor. That’s easy enough to say, you tell middle-class
people that and they get a vague notion of what you mean. Growing up poor doesn’t
just mean being deprived of brand-name clothing for back-to-school, or eating
an excess of tinned food.
My parents were poor, their parents were poor, and their parents were poor. That’s the
legacy I’ve grown up with, and I’m content with that. Proud of it even, in a
perverse way. Another part of growing up poor is learning to despise & envy
the rich. So my conflicting emotions on the matter throughout my teenage years
were, “God damn it, why couldn’t I have been born a wealthy heiress,” and “Yeah,
we’ve always been poor. That’s what actual human beings are about. Rich people
are disconnected from reality, their experiences shallow and meaningless.”
Obviously, I knew I was part of Sarah Palin’s “Real America”. (Coincidentally,
she herself is not.)
Poverty is depressing. Poverty makes families fight, a
screaming match between a 6-year-old who wants a Happy Meal and doesn’t
understand what Mom means when she says she can’t afford it. “Write a check!” I’d
advise, before the realization of what poverty actually meant.
By the time I was eight or nine, I was beginning to
understand that wearing the same plain white pair of $10 sneakers from Family
Dollar all year—long after the soles had begun to peel off—was simply not
acceptable. Arriving to school decked out in stained, pilling & ill-fitted
things from the charity shop did not win me friends. (Neither did my insistence
that the Revelation was just around the corner and all those Hollister-clad douchebags
were going to get theirs… which is a topic for another time.)
Mocked by all the other children for being the poorest poor
kid in a school full of people who actually thought Wal-Mart clothing was
acceptably cool, I became surly and withdrawn. I don’t think I had a true
friend until 6th grade, with the notable exception of Katie.
Katie was giving, she was incredibly kind, and she tolerated
my over-the-top obsession with Animorphs. I loved going to Katie’s house. Her
parents would always order pizza (pizza!) and the refrigerator was well-stocked
with brand name goodies and treats. I’d eat my fill of all the things we couldn’t
afford at home: Fruit Roll-ups, Gushers, Hot Pockets and Pizza Bites. Their
kitchen was never safe from me, I ate like a dog, consuming everything in sight
because it was there.
This is a bad habit that persists to this day—with the
exception of dinner dates (no one wants a food baby in a bodycon dress) I am an
unstoppable monster around free food. I will eat every last bit of sliced
cheese, fancy crackers, crudité and truffle chocolates, long past the point of
being full.
I mean, these are the kind of habits you pick up when you’re
instructed by your mother, in total seriousness, to “eat all the free samples
you can” at the local Cost-Co. “Because,” she would add wryly, “you know we
haven’t got anything this good at home.”
So, poverty makes you crazy. It makes you cheap. You pinch
pennies, you mooch from sample ladies. Profound grudges develop over a $5 debt never repaid. It makes you miserable. I remember many, many long hours in front
of the TV, swilling 39¢ off-brand cola with my mother, neither of us speaking a
word to each other that wasn’t in relation to whatever police procedural we
were half-watching. In fact, if I were going to make some kind of “Pie Chart of
Family Time”, it would lean heavily on the Law & Order and Big K cola.
“Oh,” the enlightened intellectual might be saying right
now, “but there are so many hobbies that cost nothing, that expand the mind,
rather than dulling it.” (My ‘enlightened intellectual’ is some Victorian
d-bag, it seems) Hey, guess what, buddy: poor people are usually uneducated. A
good percentage of them don’t even bother. In America, the poor are discouraged
at every turn from bettering themselves. Why do you think movies about going
from rags-to-riches are supposed to be so uplifting? Protip: Because that shit
is hella rare.
When everyone in your family, as far back as you can trace
it, was piss-poor, why would you expect to turn out any differently? No, better
to be content with your lot in life, get a job in a factory or something. Watch
some Law & Order. Or hockey or something? Whatever, sports can just fuck
right off. But I digress.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I think the 1% are so completely
disconnected from reality that they have no idea what it’s like to be human.
Maybe I’m trying to say that you’ll never live like Common People. Mostly, what
I’m getting at here, is that even the upper-middle class, those plush carpet
owning bastards, don’t get it. Poverty isn’t something that just happens
to you because you’re lazy, or stupid. Poverty is something that’s been carefully
fostered and tended, like a fancyass hothouse rose, by the bougie motherfuckers
in charge, for about as long as humans have been documenting history. It’s not
the fault of the 99% that they haven’t “made it”, and one of the most ingenious
ideas that the rich have ever come up with is the American Dream. Work hard—no,
harder—and one day, you too will be wealthy and happy. Meanwhile, those same
idle rich titter to each other as the proles they’ve cleverly mislead work 60 hour
weeks for them, chasing endlessly after something that they’ll never be allowed to
grasp.
I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of people who have built
themselves up from nothing. That’s obviously not true. There are people out
there who’ve started off with less than you could imagine, who are doing
brilliantly now. And we probably know (of) each and every one of them, as they’re
presented to us with a shiny red bow. “Look, your new aspirational figure!” Those
people got there through hard work, intelligence, but most of all luck. It takes luck to beat the kind of
odds that are stacked against class mobility (which is a fucking joke in its
self).
Once again, I still don’t know where I’m going with this. Just
that I’m angry about it. I’m angry that my mother can work like a dog for her
entire life, and never have anything, and people will assume that she’s just
lazy or didn’t try hard enough. I’m angry on behalf of everyone who’s lived, or will
live that life. I’m angry that the “welfare queen” stereotype even exists. I’m
angry that classism is completely ignored in America, neatly brushed under the
rug while politidicks parrot phrases like “hard-working Americans” and shove
our noses to the grindstone.
I’m just so goddamn pissed off about the whole
situation and I don’t even know what I could ever do about it because it’s been
going on as long as people have been around and I’m only one person and I
wouldn’t even know where to begin. I’m angry that I feel completely
impotent against it. I’m angry that the majority of people who grew up middle-
or upper class will never understand, or even try to. I’m angry that “poverty
builds character” has 28,100,000 results on Google. I’m angry that phrase even
exists. It’s just some bullshit excuse, something those who Have tell
themselves about the Havenots, a way to sweep the delicate cobwebs of guilt out
of their minds before they peacefully go to sleep.
I don’t know if this made any sense. I don’t really care. I
didn’t start this blog to write angry rants about classism, I started it to
post pretty pictures of fancy clothes. But where else am I going to put this
thing? LiveJournal?
P.S. I’m aware of many wonderful people who I know—or
know of—who DO give a damn about classism, even if they came from a more
privileged background. I truly don’t hold privilege against people anymore, I
got over that years ago. If someone is lucky enough to be born better-off, I
hope they take full advantage of the opportunities that gives them, and I don’t
begrudge them for it. What I do begrudge them for is looking down their noses
at the lower-classes, as if they had just “worked harder” they'd magically be in the same
place the wealthy are today. It’s not about work. It’s about systematic oppression and
modern-day slavery.
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