Lessons from My Drive

Okay, so you know that I've been wearing a groove in the road from here (NW Georgia) to NYC. Well, in all that driving I've burned a lot of cash and a lot of fuel. Neither of those ideas much please me, I can tell you. But aside from that, I want to tell you something that I noticed.

There are a lot of people living close to the edge. Let me explain.

Th apartment in Brooklyn turned out to be a three floor walk up in a working class neighborhood. The reason I'm telling you this is for purposes of numbers. Population. See, for every three floor walk up, it's probably safe to say that there are approximately three people or three families living in what may be, to the middle class eye, defined as rather sparse conditions. (I wouldn't even begin to describe how the upper class or uber-rich person might define such living conditions. Come to think of it, those conditions simply do not exist to the uber-rich. They simply can't see it.)

On my drive, I passed plenty of small old houses, manufactured housing, starter homes, apartment buildings, and rundown abodes. There were plenty of once beautiful, sprawling farms in Pennsylvania dotting Interstate 81. At one time, those farms were tidy, painted and proud. Now many of them have fallen into disrepair and neglect.

Everywhere I looked as I drove through the Shenandoah Valley, I could see farms and old homes. I was struck by the size of some of the farm houses that likely housed large families at one time. Now they are dwarfed by the size of a typical McMansion in a gated community. And these new palaces likely house families no larger than four people.

As I surveyed this slice of the American landscape, I was struck by the notion that there are more of us living close to the edge than there are those who are comfortably in the middle or sitting on top.

As gas prices rise and all the associated costs go with them, I can't help but wonder how this economy is going to sustain itself. The price of petroleum touches so much, how can we not reach the breaking point sooner rather than later? How will people who are already on the edge keep from going over?

I know that we're in that often-discussed category of being one paycheck away from disaster. Now that I'm unemployed, we're spurred on to cut costs, but we'll also be making some choices between what gets paid and what doesn't. The two essentials - fuel and food - can be cut back some, but not completely. Those ever-expanding bills shrink what we can pay toward our mortgage, healthcare, and other expenses.

In the meantime, every time The Dancer tells me that she needs gas in her car (calm down, it's a 95 Celica that was a gift from her aunt), I cringe. That edge moves ever closer. Even if I do find work, the edge is going to continue to inch toward us as daily living costs go higher and higher. We are not alone in this. I'm afraid we'll have plenty of company in that economic tumble down. The old adage "safety in numbers" will have a bitter ring to it when counting the number of people at the bottom.

Originally posted May 22, 2008

Middle Class Illusions

I've got to hand it to Bob Herbert. Today he was on in more ways than one. He wrote this piece for the NY Times and then he was on MSNBC's Morning Joe where he noted that it's harder and harder for Americans to 1) Be in the middle class; 2) Hang on to their place in the middle class; 3) Move into the middle class from the working class. Now, I don't know about you, but I find the topic of class divisions refreshing. I don't think it's discussed enough.

I was especially interested when Herbert brought up the fact that at one time, a middle class lifestyle could be obtained and maintained with one salary earned by a man with a college education or a good manufacturing job. (Credit where credit is due - Pat Buchanan was sitting there, too, agreeing with Herbert and reinforcing his position. His feminine alter ego Bay was nowhere to be seen. Thank goodness.)

The main point that Herbert was making was that the American middle class has been losing ground for quite a while and most of us haven't recognized it or let ourselves be aware of it. Where my dad, a forklift driver for (please forgive me) Monsanto who worked a lot of overtime - thank you, dad - was able to afford a nice home, nice cars, vacations, a swimming pool, etc. and my father-in-law, a Chicago public school teacher, supported six kids in a three bedroom ranch on the NW side, imagine now trying to pull that off. First of all, those jobs like my dad's just don't exist so much anymore. And I can tell you, a teacher's salary cannot support a family of five, never mind six.

One of the things Herbert pointed out was that the struggle to maintain middle classdom has been masked by a growing use of credit. Lord, yes. The other point he made was that when women went to work outside the home, in large numbers, their income helped mask the ground being lost by men in their buying power. That was true in my family, as well as in MathMan's. My mom went back to work when I was in the third grade (1974ish). MathMan's mom got a job outside the home in the early '80s. I suspect that one of the reasons our moms went to work was to stretch their husband's paychecks. I know for a fact that my mom went to work to help pay her McAlpin's and Shillito's bills. Those were the ones she trained us to retrieve from the mailbox before Dad got home. We dutifully hid them in her underwear drawer.

Identifying the problem doesn't fix the problem, but for about three minutes today, viewers of MSNBC were reminded that what they think is a comfy middle class life is fleeting and getting harder to hold on to all the time. With the increasing impact of rising fuel costs and all the associated things that will increase in cost, too, most of us who thought we were middle class will find our grip loosening even more to the point that many of us will slip into the vast pool of poor without ever being able to put the words to what is happening to us.

Originally posted June 10, 2008