It’s incredibly difficult for me to approach this subject with any impartiality or grace. I am a white male in his thirties who grew up in a predominately white middle-class working-class family and community in the American midwest before relocating to the northeast before the start of the century. I’ve been accused on many occasions of having privilege of many varieties. White privilege. Upper middle-class privilege. It doesn’t help that I am fat, since we live in a society that judges those who retain weight with being privileged with the position of never missing a meal, compared to someone else who has to. Even this very internet I am using to type this on is a privilege afforded to me through my status as a middle-class person.
But the fact really is, I am not that far off from any other person around me. In fact, I would estimate that in order for me to be put in a position of having to ask for government assistance, either with rent, groceries, or health care, I would have to lose my job, my car, and my home, either all at once, or over the span of one month, maybe two. I own no property, have no hard assets, and effectively finance all but my belongings in my apartment. Actually, a fire started by a cardboard box in the kitchen could substantially set me back. I’ve been living in this danger zone since I moved out of home three years after high school. I’ve been working a job since I was sixteen. I’ve been unemployed an estimated total of three months out of fourteen years. I’ve worked jobs ranging from retail, food service, consumer electronics, before finally becoming an IT engineer. I have no formal education past a high school degree, only a vocational school degree and about five or more years of working experience. I have no children, but am married to a woman who grooms animals for a living, which allows us to at least afford a moderate lifestyle, though by no means extravagant by any means. We buy our big ticket items on discount or sales. We shop at grocery stores like Aldi to save some money on common items. We occasionally shop at BJs for bulk items and household supplies. I spend little to no money on clothes, stretching my laundry cycles to bi-weekly to save money on washing and drying. We eat out seldomly, to save money on food costs. We take one “vacation” a year to a place we volunteer working for a weekend. We don’t leave the country, we don’t take cruises, we don’t even have passports. I donate over two hundred dollars or more to charities and organizations. I volunteer through my job because part of our mission as a social enterprise is to give back to the community, and it’s something I used to do being a Boy Scout as a kid, and slacked off on in my crunchier years, so it’s something I am trying to get back. This list can go on. The point is, I have every right to get on here and be a part of this discussion. I don’t need to be among the poorest Americans in this country to be credible, or have a say in what we should or should not do. My status as a person, as a gender, as an orientation, or anything else, has no relevancy in any of this.
I spent the past hour and a half watching Inequality for All on Netflix, at the pseudo-insistence of my mother. Robert Reich is a convincing speaker, that I will not deny, but by the end of the film, I had more questions than I had answers. That’s a good thing. Every American, regardless of anything, should have questions. If you do not have questions about what you’ve watched, or want to know more about the various topics explained, you are part of the block of people men like Rush Limbaugh refer to as “low-information voters”. You’re the people who listen to President Obama speak and jump out of your chair before the speech ended to tell your friends on Facebook how right he was about whatever it is he spoke about. He knows this. He tailors his speeches and “stocks” the space behind him with people he knows you will identify with and sympathize with their cause. He’ll bring up people to deliver personal stories about whatever so that you connect on the most basic human emotional level and spread that basic human emotional level to everyone else. “Low-information” doesn’t mean you are stupid, or otherwise ignorant of politics, it means you simply don’t care about what’s being talked about. You want your side to win. It’s like a game of football, and the player who makes the plays and shows up on screen as straightforward and human as possible is the person you support. LeBron James is a talented basketball player, but younger fans love him because he “struts his shit” and doesn’t care what other people think. That appeals to boys who enjoy the raw emotional charge of “playing the game”. They don’t care about his career stats, other players’ stats, statistics and trends, or players’ salaries. Major League Baseball tells you that drugs are bad, but it doesn’t seem to hurt their business bottom line, right? There is a lot of information out there, but it takes someone who wants to know more to fully understand it and make their own conjectures.