Class War II

A Commentary by William C. Shelton

Kurt Vonnegut observed that many societies have folk tales about people who are poor, but wise or courageous and worthy of esteem.  In the U.S., we have no such traditions.

If you are poor, you are unworthy of consideration, and may very well be lazy and morally flawed.  Yet the hardest working people I have ever known in my life were poor.

We celebrate stories of individuals who rose from poverty to wealth as examples that anyone who works hard can become financially successful.  Yet both the chances and the requirements of a hard working poor person achieving this are not dissimilar from those of winning the lottery. 

This is true in many developed countries.  John Lennon, a working class kid from Liverpool, became bitter when his success was offered as an example of boundless opportunity.  In ‚ÄúWorking Class Hero,‚Äù he wrote

Keep you doped up with sex, religion, and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still ****ing peasants, as far as I can see.

Fairly harsh.  But in the U.S., we imagine that we don‚Äôt have Europe‚Äôs class constraints.  In fact, the Wall Street Journal, which describes itself as ‚Äúthe daily diary of the American dream,‚Äù reported last May 13th that ‚Äúthe typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity‚Äù than in the U.S.  Maybe we should pursue the European dream.

Unlike in Europe‚Äôs ‚Äúclass society,‚Äù when we do not achieve material success, we imagine that it is due to lack of effort or ability or to some undefined personal failure.  The less we are integrated into a fabric of community, the more we are vulnerable to such perceptions.

My father‚Äôs family were share croppers.  My mother‚Äôs father was a small-time bootlegger who was shot to death.  My father sold bus tickets. The obstructive lung disease that killed him came from second-hand smoke that he inhaled on the job.  The last and most lucrative year of his work life, he made $12,000.

I remember feeling a hot flush of shame when, as a child, I would watch my mother in the market, making a painful calculation of what she would have to give up in order to buy bread and milk. I thought that there must be something wrong with us because we were poor.

We lived in Compton, a California city so distressed and dangerous that parents in next-door Watts threaten to take misbehaving children there.  My youthful companions were largely smarter, or braver, or more hard working than I, but they are now mostly long dead or in prison.

I left high school. Through the grace of God, I did not die, and I did not start a family as a teenager. Eventually, I took classes at community college.  I transferred to the University of California, where tuition is now 24 times what it was when I was a student.  I was later able to earn an MBA at Yale.

Massachusetts poet Marge Piercy expresses my own feelings about being cited as an example that anyone can make it.  She writes,

I did not get out because I was smart, brave, hard working, attractive‚Ķ.I wriggled through an opening left just big enough for one.  There is no virtue in survival, only luck and a streak of indifference that I could take off and keep going.  I got out of those Detroit blocks, where the air eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs dangle and you jump and jump, where there are more drugs than books, more ways to die than ways to live, because I ran fast, ran hard, and never stopped looking back.

Where I ultimately ran to, was Somerville.  I chose my adopted home because it had a stronger sense of community than any American city I have ever known.  That community fabric is unraveling now as Somerville residents who can not afford housing are replaced with young professionals who bid up housing prices and then move to the suburbs when their children reach school age.

I have seen what happens to a community that cannot offer jobs to its young people or raise tax revenues sufficient to prepare them.  I became involved in Assembly Square development policy, because there is no other undeveloped Somerville land that has the infrastructure, location, and scale necessary to produce the tax revenues and jobs that we need.   

In that effort, I haven‚Äôt seen much benefit coming to Somerville residents.  I have seen a few politicians use misleading fictions to get elected, and a few developers make obscene profits while building nothing.

The latter are prime candidates to be celebrated as examples of how the system is ripe with opportunity.  But if the system worked in this, the wealthiest society in human history, we would have and need no such stories, because no one who worked hard would be poor.