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

This is why she's always been in gifted classes

Always thinking, The Dancer has come up with a great way out of our financial difficulties.

Scooters to replace our cars? Nope.

Pantyhose on our heads and robbing banks? Nope.

Agreeing to finally work the pole? Nope.

Getting a job? Well, she did that, but it will only help pay her dance studio fees.

Her solution?

Watching wrestling. Except here we pronounce it rasslin'.

My brother, Uncle Chief of Police, would be so proud. He was a "Rowdy" Roddy Piper fan back in the day.

Because I spent a large chunk of my teens trying to get out of the Full Nelson, that's why.

Adventures in Real Parenting: More from the School of Benign Neglect

Yesterday, Lisa at Lemon Gloria wrote about some slight anxiety she's having about parenting. She and her fiance Nick spent the weekend with some friends who have one little boy and the experience gave Lisa some new perspective of parenting. In her post, Lisa wondered:

...You need to be vigilant: You hear the most surprising things. It never occurs to you that you might hear, from the living room, "No, sweetie, don't put a strawberry in Lisa's book. She doesn't like that." Which leaves you to wonder if at some point, when it's your own kid, you get really tired and are just like, oh, go ahead, put the strawberry in the book..

To which I left two comments. In the first, I repeated what MathMan had asked me to convey.

Your fears are well founded.

In the second, I was a little more full frontal me - as in Yeah! Parenting by benign neglect! Woot!

Oh, yes, yes, and yes. Go ahead with the strawberry, go ahead with the paint on the white sofa, go ahead with the Barbie hot tub in the toilet. It all happens because at some point, the 100% vigilance is boiled down to:
1) No blood
2) No fire
3) No sharp objects
4) Not near mommy's laptop
5) Just don't tell daddy

I thought of this this morning when I had the following conversation with Cupcake:

Cupcake: I'm hungry.
Me (not taking my eyes off the monitor): Uh huh.
Cupcake: Can I have a smore?
Me: Absolutely not. Not for breakfast!
Cupcake: Well then, what? There's nothing to eat! (in a really whiny tone that made me grind my teeth)
Me: There's cereal.
Cupcake: No.
Me: I could make you some scrambled eggs, toast? Peanut butter and brown stuff? Yogurt? Fruit?

All was met with snorting derision. I had a blog post to finish and some pictures to edit.

 Originally posted June 12, 2008

The Rascist in Me

Ah, my racist roots. Where shall I begin?

I grew up in a white working/middle class family in Southeastern Indiana. Need I say more?

My dad, a forklift driver for Monsanto (again, please forgive me) for over thirty-five years was a hereditary racist. Not outwardly hateful, but basic, a black person is different and therefore less racist. He, a man with high school education and a solid hold smack dab in the middle class via his factory job, considered himself better than anyone of color. Or at least that's the impression he gave us through his words.

I later understood that part of what we heard was fear. He feared that his place in the middle class was threatened by the encroachment of minorities which were, in his world, African Americans. That fear mirrors the fear and racism now being displayed towards Latinos, especially in places like where we live here in Georgia. Factory jobs have all but disappeared and the sames kinds of jobs at in that pay range are scarce. Blame the Mexicans. It's easier to do that to rail at the powers that be who made the financial decisions to close the factories and outsource the jobs.

What uneducated people understand better maybe than educated people do is the law of resources. They understand that if there are people on top, they are supported by lots of people down below. They also understand that when things are limited, it's a fight for survival to hold on to what you've got and it's an even greater struggle to obtain more. That was my dad. He understand in a very basic way that there were only so many jobs to go around in that factory on the Ohio River bend in Addiston. And if all the sudden a lot of "them" were getting those jobs, then a lot of "him" would be losing theirs. The jobs were not limitless. Quotas became a buzzword. Reverse discrimination was murmured. Rumors were rampant about how "things were shifting" in that factory and many others.

To be honest, I never saw my father be disrespectful to anyone of color. In my mind's eye, I can see him, like most white people I knew (and even now, know), treating people of color with a "certain kind" of respect, a careful respect, a subtle arm's length approach that said "let's just get through this with these fake smiles as quickly as possible because, dammit, my cheeks are starting to hurt." That kind of respect. Not exactly grudging. Not exactly sincere.

But the words. Oh my. My own cheeks burn a little when I think of the string of epithets we kids used to hear coming from our dad's straight-toothed grin. Holy cats, some of those phrases would peel your skin off, leaving you there a strung together diagram of sinewy flesh and moist bones like a picture in an anatomy text book.

I won't list those words and phrases here. But there were plenty of them and they were quite colorful. To my child's ear, some of them were funny and lyrical, comical really. Some referred to continent of origin, I suppose. Others were based, naturally, on darkness of skin. My father didn't make up those words, of course. He learned them from his parents and the other superior, but poor, whites he grew up around in that small Ohio River town.

I remember once riding my bike down to see if Dad was at my grandparents' house. He wasn't there, but Grandma was. She was sitting on the back porch snapping green beans from her garden.

"Do you know where Daddy is?" I asked, leaning my bike into the grass and hopping up the cement step onto the porch.

"Well, I think he went out to help the ni**ers with something," she answered in her crackly grandma voice.

I did not bat an eye at this. I was probably ten years old or so. It was nothing for my grandma to point out my summer color. "You're getting brown as a berry," she'd say, adjusting her whistling hearing aid. "Better watch it or people will mistake you for a picaninny."

Let me just tell you right here and now if anyone spoke that way in front of me now, I would make such a nuisance of myself explaining why that is unacceptable.

When I hear racist language from unrelated adults, I don't call them out. I hate to admit it, but if an adult uses that kind of language in front of me, I leave, I don't school them. I figure they know that they are doing something wrong and choose to behave that way anyway. If they say something racist in front of my kids, I leave, taking my kids with me and I explain why that language is unacceptable.

Believe me when I tell you that this is not a defense of my father's racism, but back when he used those words, it was more common, even in "polite" society. How horrifying. My mother, once distressed that I used the N word, instructed Dad to talk to me and make sure that I never said that word again. I'll never forget the day he told me that if I even thought that word, the nearest ni**, he stopped himself, the nearest black person would come and cut my ears off. Thanks, Dad. That was brilliant. Make me afraid of black people.

But that is how racism is. It's part of who we are. Some of us are raised with it. It comes in different varieties - mild to scorching, but it's there. It's what we do with it that defines us. See, it would have been very easy for me to simply absorb my father's attitude about African Americans and to go through my life assuming superiority to people of color simply because I'm white and of European descent.

Never mind that most of my ancestors were extraordinarily poor, one was brought to Virginia as a criminal/slave for fighting against the British in Scotland. When the lady on the rock invited other countries to send their poor, my ancestors were pushed onto the damn boats - steerage, of course. Even so, we were taught that we were superior somehow.

Instead I chose to reject my family's racism. When Mathman and I started our family, I informed my father that racial slurs would not be tolerated in front of our kids. He has complied. I once got into an ugly shouting match with my paternal grandfather in our front yard because upon learning that I was dating a Moroccan while in France, he had the nerve to ask me why I just couldn't date nice American guys?

Nice American guys is code for white, of course.

There's my proof that I will call my family out on their racism. I may share the DNA, but I do not share their views. I wish I had the spine to be just as forceful with unrelated racists, but I don't. I'm quite convinced that nothing I could say would change their behavior if they're an adult in 2008 and still using racial slurs.

Now that we're about to see racism of all varieties on the most public display since the Civil Rights Era, I'm curious to see just what kind of character America has.

Let's just say, I'm not terribly optimistic.

Originally posted June 13, 2008

Closer to It

Like the last couple of Springs here in Georgia, this one got hot fast. By early June, it seemed like we were as hot as we'd be in July. When you opened your car door, waves of canned heat smacked you in the face. The pavement shimmered in the glaring sunlight. The only thing saving us from being all brown and dusty by now were some well scattered showers and a better than usual accumulation of rain in March and April.

It wasn't like June 2004, our first full summer in the Deep South, when it rained so much we pretended we were living in England as we spent mornings indoors, having tea and watching The Secret Garden and Hope and Glory over and over until we had the dialog and accents down pat. That was a glorious year for the garden and the mosquitoes. What we didn't realize was that those June rains portended a new phenomena for us. Hurricanes.

Coming from the Midwest, we'd endured blizzards, deep freezes and withering heat waves. We'd even run through hail in our bare feet as tornado sirens blasted in our ears, but hurricanes were new to us. We rode out Hurricane Ivan with a mix of excited curiosity as it swept up from the Gulf Coast and rain-soaked and wind-blasted even us, tucked up into the Northwest Georgia pine forest.

A couple of days later, we named a litter of kittens after the Hurricanes. Frances, Ivan, Charlie and the non-hurricane inspired Morris. They were born on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend and we thought those fitting name for those babies of a stray we'd taken in. Their mama kitty McGuffy, had squeezed her thick, pregnant body into the crack between the wall and our youngest daughter's bed when it was time to have her babies.

Morris, the last to be born, is a yellow, long haired tabby who turned out to be a very large cat with a penchant for peeing where he shouldn't. We still have Morris and, though he'd never earn an academic scholarship to Kitty University, he's likable enough and the children love him. I'd like to ring his maned neck for his bad habits, but mostly, I love him, too. The ill-mannered oaf.

But I was telling you about the weather. It was really, really hot here. And then, a couple of days ago, we got a break from the searing heat and dripping humidity. No longer was driving in my un-air-conditioned car a draining chore.

Now I could ride with all the windows down and the sunroof open and not feel like I'd just run a marathon. Where before I'd felt all hot and sticky and crabby from the open air drive, now I felt a sense of openness and closeness with the outer world. When the air-conditioning worked, I would ride with my windows sealed tight, the outside world banished as I tooled along in my hermetically-sealed existence.

When people ask Southerners and Southwesterners "How do you stand the heat?" and we answer "I go from air-conditioned house, to air-conditioned car, to air-conditioned workplace," we are not kidding.

Spring and Summer and a good block of Fall in warmer climes means never really breathing in the fresh air if you can help it. If you're even slightly asthmatic, it could trigger an attack. Even if you're not afflicted, you may find the boiled afternoon air to be hard to breathe.

So the last couple of days, we've flung open the windows and enjoyed the fresh air. Driving on the freeway, I'm inundated with the smells and sounds of traffic. The large trucks make a terrible racket as I glide past them. Sometimes there are cars, with the music so loud and obnoxious, that I wish for a semi to come and drown out the throbbing noise. Even the morning traffic jam is nicer as I sit in the far left lane and listen to the tall, dry grasses rustle and whisper alongside the idling vehicles.

But when I get out into the country, closer to home, I'm treated to the sounds of birds carried on the wind and the smell of flowers lining the roadsides and dotting the fields. And, of course because it is the country, the occasional whiff of death emanating from some unseen animal corpse hidden in tall weeds or silage or worse, the smell from the factory chicken farm.

At home, we've shut off the central air and opened the windows, as well. Now as I sit writing, I can listen to the clicking of birds on the large, swing-arm feeder. I can hear the bluejay and tufted titmouse knocking the sunflower seed against the wooden feeder's edge to get at the meat inside. I hear the flapping of wings as the female cardinal takes flight, startled by the arrival of a male, and I eavesdrop on the quiet conversation between the male and female house finch as they take turns keeping watch as the other pecks about in the feeder.

The other day I noticed that when a male cardinal is eating, he doesn't mind if other bird species come along and join him. But if a female or another male cardinal lands, there is a bit of a scuffle before only one is left to eat. The mockingbirds, for their part, engage in rowdy chases, making a pinched noise as they fly at each other. The male redwinged blackbird, solitary and friendless, screeches loudly just as he lands to eat. No one, but no one, is allowed to join him on the feeder.

The swing arm feeder is positioned right outside the window to my left. Around it grows an unruly Chinese wisteria that loops and dangles. The birds have developed a queuing system of landing on the drooping vines to await their turn in the flat, wooden feeder. This works well for the sparrows and finches who blithely alight and hang on as the wisteria bounces to a stop, mid-air. Sometimes, though, a larger bird like a cardinal will try to land on the vines and they and the vine will dip down, down, down closer to the ground. Quickly, I hear wings beating as the surprised bird jumps to the safety of the air, leaving the wisteria boing-boinging up and down like snapped elastic.

Last evening, drowning out the sounds of the birds as they settled down for the night, were the noises of our neighbors' barky dogs. In front of us, the German Shepard dogs were having a growly conversation about something exciting. Next door, the Australian Shepard and his companion were debating something in loud woofs and an occasional bay. Beyond them, the little dogs, a rag-tag band of chihuahuas and rat terriers, were carrying on in their squeaky yips and yaps.

I wondered if Sasquatch was strolling through the neighborhood again. Then there was a crescendo of yelps and yaps and barks and then nothing except the occasional soft note from the wind chimes.

This morning, I've been treated to the good morning sounds of the wild birds and the er-e-er-e-eeeerrrrr of the penned roosters down the road. The occasional red-winged blackbird screams out as it prepares to dine at the feeder and there are crickets adding a low background noise. Large bees hover and glance at me through the screen. I'm relieved that they are out there and I am in here.

The male cats, Tiger and Pyewacket, exchange a territorial hissing and yowling through the glass of the back door. A sleeping child, who apparently stayed up late watching a movie last night, stretches on the sofa, breathes deeply and turns over for more sleep. The curtains framing the large front window shimmy on the breeze, as the sun and clouds try to agree on how hot it's going to be today.

I like being closer to it.

Originally posted June 21, 2008

Adventures in Real Parenting; Maybe They Should Issue Licenses to Parent

The children are very inappropriate. The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of their parents, MathMan and me. Our crime is being ourselves in front of them.

Oh, and laughing. Just like Mrs. Brown admonished us when we laughed at Howard W. when he did the Donald Duck voice in first grade.......if we laugh, we'll only encourage them.

Cases in point.

The Actor.
The Actor has been using his timing, improvisational and mimicking skills to do a very inappropriate imitation of someone with special needs. Even as he launches into this character, he's aware that it's wrong. "Don't say retarded around me! It's special needs!"

Yesterday evening at supper I told him that karma was going to catch up with him and he'd end up with a brain injury of some sort and then we wouldn't be laughing, would we? He only seized on the phrase "karma is going to catch up with you," and started running around the great room asking if karma was behind him.

My very politically aware self was horribly offended by this and insisted that he stop.

When I'm laughing so hard that I have to hold my sides and gasp for breath, my demands are hardly effective.

Cupcake.
The Actor had another baseball game yesterday and couldn't find his cup. No wonder. When I'd finally had enough of the cloud of dust that rose up anytime you walked across his carpet, I started cleaning. His cup was exactly where he left it: under his dresser.

When he got home, he noticed his cup where I'd left it on top of his dresser and asked where I found it. I answered from the kitchen where I was doing something with Cupcake.

She recoiled in disgust. "Did you pick up his cup?

"Yes, with my teeth."

"Ewwwww. Mom," she paused and then ventured into another venue of gross. "I bet you would if it was Daddy's."

"Ewwwww. No way."

She wasn't going to let me off that easily. "Come on, admit it. You know you would have....."

The Dancer.
She has been home more than usual. It's been quite lovely to have her around except she's on a total health kick and I have to sneak around if I want to eat confectioner's sugar straight from the canister. What a nag.

Now that she's around, the bickering has escalated, though most of it is put on for show. It hasn't been that long since my siblings and I engaged in witty banter that made our mother develop a fondness for gin.

Yesterday I was clucking about the nonsense that went on at the supper table when The Dancer looked at me steadily and uttered a four word solution.

"Duct tape and a sock."

Originally posted June 23, 2008

What a long, strange trip it's been

Welcome back to PoliTits.

Thanks to Bob Mutch who was kind enough to turn over administration of my old blog to me. I realize it's mostly writer's vanity, but I am thrilled to have this old blog back.While I'll continue to write at That's Why, my plan is to use this space for two purposes.

1. Repopulate it with the best of the old material.
2. Write new content about politics and, yes, sex. It's been suggested that I try my hand (again) at some erotica. I think yes. Here's the place for that.

In the meantime, pardon me while I rebuild.

Special note about Bob. He's left us some links in exchange for the blog. You'll find them under Valuable Resources.

xoxo,

Lisa