Class Issues

In the process of cleaning up/reorganizing some stuff around home, I came across an issue of Utne I had held back because I wanted to feature an article in it because the essay connects to some of my own "class issues."

In "Cutting Class" from an issue of Utne a year ago, Brad Zellar explores his working class guilt.

If you have to boil my "issues" down to a basic statement, it would this: rich people usually piss me off.

It's not that I grew up poor or anything. Sure, when my dad got laid off by National Tea when I was quite young, I remember there being stress within the house. He moved on to selling insurance for a while and then was lucky enough to acquire a small business loan that helped him start his business. For a major part of his life, my dad was a meat cutter and then carried over some of his meat cutting skills to when he ran his own small grocery store on what people considered the "wrong side" of the industrial town in which I grew up.

So I guess I understand the working class pretty well because I come from that stock (both parents were children during the Great Depression--one from rural northeastern Missouri, the other from an essentially single-parent home in northwestern Iowa), and I was raised in what could be called a "factory town" -- factories, mills, and meat packing plants. The stores I worked in were visited by folks who worked putting together tractors or slaughtering hogs.

And the thing is I was envious of the kids whose dads worked at the John Deere plants, or to use the phrase in my hometown, they worked at "Deere." It was always pretty clear what kids' parents worked at Deere because they were the ones who got braces. Those of us who didn't have great insurance plans, we were left with what was in our jaws unless our collections of teeth were especially horrific.

Like Zellar recounts in his essay, my parents would also take me on car rides to look at the big houses, which when I reflect on that practice now, it kind of sickens me -- the gawking at the big homes in the fancy part of town or the oversized houses on the edge of town where the darkness is, as Springsteen informs us.

I fooled around with some of the girls from the rich part of town though, sitting in their homes watching movies and doing other things, often admiring what they seemed to have so easily.

I waited on very good people who came into our grocery or liqour store with pig blood on them, their hands aching from their duties on the cutting floor, cashing their checks as they bought a bottle or to visit a local bar.

Where I worked was an interesting mix of black and white folks. The stores I worked at had trailor "parks" right across from them. Not that far away was the area where many working and middle class black families lived. There was rarely any open racial hostility during store hours, but sometimes you noticed tension among "mixed" clentile.

What Zellar's article also got me to thinking about is how as a country I wonder what all we really produce anymore. At one time, we Americans, well, we made stuff. Sure, we are no longer the manufacturing giant like we once were because of globalization -- for better and for worse. Now it's just that we hawk stuff while the 1% get even  richer. Or heck, I don't know, let's just say the 5-10% get richer while they have natural inroads for success and safety nets along with McMansions on the Hills.

Like Zellar, "[t]ime and time again I committed the terrible sin of envy, until it became wholly ingrained in my makeup and I eventually developed a chip on my shoulder that I felt no amount of accomplishment would ever manage to erase."

Which is why I have interal reactions like I did a number of years ago when I was talking to one of my colleagues. I asked him how his summer was, and he said it was great because he spent quite a bit of it in Paris. For someone like me who has only been to Ontario for a couple of fishing trips and family vacations were spent visiting family or going to exotic places like South Dakota, the idea of going to Europe doesn't seem probable. My reaction to a really nice man's statement that he spent time with his wife in Paris angered me, not because I don't like him or his wife (they're nice people by all accounts), but because of envy, of the fact that some people over the course of my life always seem to have it so easy -- my internal, jaded sense of justice.

And it's pride, which as we know comes before the fall. Even if I have accomplishments, I'm wary that I'm gonna get screwed eventually. Healthy...

One of the events that got me thinking back to Zellar's article is, of course, Christmas and the deluge of presents my children received. As he relates toward the close of the essay, "The dream of our parents' has become a reality of millions of us, but it also, inevitably, comes at someone else's expense and, to a lesser extent, at our own."

For me, I want my kids to be able to both know the sciences and philosophy and art and poetry, but I also want them to appreciate the majesty of Hank Williams, master the art of talking to and being open to diverse people (diversity based on class and ethnicity and creed), and most importantly know how to get things done.

I acknowledge that this post is a bit scatterbrained, but it might also reflect that, like Zellar, sometimes I feel that I'm "an interloper in all worlds."

So it goes.