Luck of birth

I've been struck by the responses in my "are you a victim" thread. Several people have stated that they cried after their accident or event and went through a period of mourning. I didn't do that. My doctors were always impressed with the way I handled all of the bad news and bad prognoses, but my response was always, what else is there to do? My GP told me he thinks it is my background in philosophy that set me up for this level of acceptance. I agree. If you're able to fall back on your critical thinking, everything seems easier. That is my version of luck.

Speaking of luck, I just finished Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. I read the original Harper's article she wrote about her social experiment and always meant to read the expansion of that experiment and article. Ehrenreich attempted to live in three different U.S. cities as if she were a woman just being kicked off of welfare after welfare "reform." She had the advantage of a car and some money to start out, but she left her education and credentials at home. This is a woman who has a PhD in biology (or was it chemistry?) and had been a successful journalist/essayist for many years. You'd think she could do it, what with the advantages of education and health behind her.

Notsomuch. She did it ok in Key West and Maine, but when she attempted it in Minnesota while working for Walmart, she failed. She couldn't find affordable housing and ended up paying Walmart $45.95 a day to work there. Not only was she unable to survive, she was thrust into the culture of belittlement and discouragement. The culture where people who are not management simply do not matter; their humanity isn't as important as the bottom line.

Why is this tolerated in our country? We have enough, don't we? Is there a reason children go hungry and people can't possibly survive on one job, one very labor intensive job? What happens to these people if they get sick? Do they just, well, die? I suspect they do. What happens to their children? These are questions we should be asking, but ones we too easily sweep under the rug in favor of cheap goods and cheap labor and more stuff. It isn't right, it isn't fair, and it isn't sustainable. Someday, somehow, these people are going to have had enough. Can you blame them? I can't, and I am part of the problem.

As long as we as a culture think it is acceptable to require people to be payed less than what they can live on, simply because they made some bad choices along the way, we will have a skyrocketing crime rate. As long as we think it is ok for children to pay for the sins of their parents with grumbling tummies and less than adequate clothes, we will have a cycle of poverty and bad health paid for by the American tax payer. See, there it is! we pay for it one way or another. Yet, we refuse to do anything about it. I'm sick of it and sick about it so I am voting for Barack Obama. He may still be a politician, but he's the only one in a long time with a shot at the White House who might make the changes necessary for this country to pull itself together and stop acting like a collective assclown to the poor.