Labor Day Lament
I love working people. People who grew up with working parents, who saw something more than parenting in their parents. Something not about their children, but about conviction. Pride. When you saw your father rushing around the kitchen, gulping coffee, cutting breakfast short so as not to be late. When you saw your mother at the dining room table, maybe reading her students’ essays so she could hand them back tomorrow. She was important to people outside the family, and it made you proud.
There are many reasons, not excuses, for poverty. One of the main ones is lack of role models. If the people you look up to are down, you look down. If looking down attracts bullies, you can end up looking down on yourself more than they do. Down is a cycle so hard to break, and there aren’t many people you can look in the eye. Most of them will blame you and shame you. Sometimes it’s just too hard to get one foot in front of the other.
News flash for victim blamers: poverty is complicated, hard. It’s not laziness, but hopelessness. Shame. Discouragement.
If you grew up watching your parents work, you were halfway to being a working person long before you left high school. It was “in your blood.” That pride, determination, confidence. It probably never occurred to you not to be a working person.
For complicated reasons, some children grow up in a different kind of home. One where parents don’t work outside the home, or sometimes do but not for long. Where sometimes there isn’t any bread or milk. You can’t join a team because there’s no money to buy the uniform, or even the gas to get to practice, even if the car is running at the moment. Speaking of that, your mom went out and got a job; she was so excited. But she missed a day when the car broke down; then she missed a day because she was up all night fighting with your dad about money; then she missed a day because you had a fever, and then she got fired. Everybody in the house is overweight because the main thing they eat is potato chips, and there’s a lot of sickness, especially in the winter. The worst is when you have to go to the supermarket. If people see your mom using food stamps, it can get ugly. They look at her like she’s stealing and talk about what’s in her cart, like your family should be eating cat food from a can. You can’t wait to get out of there, but it’s depressing at home, too. And you hate school. That’s the worst.
More news: millions of poor people are working but still can’t make ends meet. That’s because our Congress has failed to legislate a minimum wage that is a living wage. You see, that might require CEOs to forgo their second yachts or fourth homes, and we can’t deprive hard-working CEOs of … well, anything. They get to have it all, that’s the American way! The people who actually perform the work that makes them rich, well, those are the suckers. They’ll do anything to keep their jobs so they still have somebody to look down on: the non-working poor.
Here’s a suggestion: raise the minimum wage to a living wage; then index it to the cost of living, so that it goes up when everything else goes up. This won’t solve all the problems, for sure. But maybe it would take some of the pressure off the middle class so that they could stop beating down the poor. That would be a start.
Lee Marcus is a columnist, playwright, and author of “Hearts Afire: The Story of Moonwhistle School.” She lives in Steuben County.
