Nickel and Dimed
by Barbara Ehrenreich
I just finished this book, which was a best seller several years ago (written in early 2000's). I had heard a lot about it, and had some serious reservations about what she did. Turned out while reading it that my reservations were totally warranted, but misplaced. She was very honest about how she 'cheated' in her experiment, but I still think there was much wrong with this experiment, book, and the
assumptions concluded. However, it was mostly an interesting story to
read, as long as you took it more as a historical fiction versus journalism,
and she did get to a very interesting point in the very last paragraphs of the
book:
"...No one ever said that you could work hard – harder even than
you ever thought possible – and still find yourself sinking ever deeper in
poverty and debt.
"
When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of
the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view
them with a certain impatience, if not disgust.
The welfare poor were excoriated for their laziness, their persistence
in reproducing in unfavorable circumstances, their presumed addictions, and above
all for their “dependency.” Here they were, content to live off “government
handouts” instead of seeking “self-sufficiency,” like everyone else, through a
job. They needed to get their act together,
learn how to wind an alarm clock, get out there and get to work. But now that government has largely withdrawn
its “handouts,” now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there
toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy’s -- well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval
and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?
"
Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re
supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the
appropriate emotion is shame – shame at our own dependency, in this case, on
the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can
live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply
and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made
you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly
termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect
their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live
in substandard housing so that the other homes will be shiny and perfect; they
endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a
member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor,
to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, "you give and
you give."
"
Someday, of course- and I will make no predictions as to
exactly when – they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to
demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day
comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all
be better off for it in the end."
Her last statement reminds me of the Good Earth, in speaking about revolution that happens ‘when the rich are too rich or
the poor are too poor.’ Did we see the fulfillment of this profecy with the Occupy movements? Did they not
gain enough steam because of complacency from the majority of the 99%? Could it be because our measure of poverty in the USA is 20 times higher than that of the
world’s? Or is it because although our democracy works slow, it works fast
enough to ward off revolution? Thoughts?
Labels: book
Xenocide
by Orson Scott Card
[Here are a few excerpts from a wonderful and stimulating book. It has won several awards and I highly recommend it. The first comment is an excellent summary of my graduate education in Social Work. The last excerpt is long, but yet so concise considering the gargantuan concept it gets across.]
"…individual human beings were still mysterious. Jane had
concluded: No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he
thought he was doing when he did it, and what he now thinks of what he did, it
is impossible to be certain what he will do next.
"-it did bother him a
little that Jane had every bit as close a relationship with Miro as him.
Isn’t
it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own
each other? Or is that buried so
deep in our genes that we can never get it out? My wife. My
friend. My lover.
"But Wang-mu said nothing, because this was one of the first
lessons she learned from Master Han. When you have wisdom that another person
knows that he needs, you give it freely.
But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom,
you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man. Qing-jao was not hungry for wisdom from
Wang-mu, and never would be. So
silence was all that Wang-mu could offer.
She could only hope that Qing-jao would find her own road to proper
obedience, compassionate decency, or the struggle for freedom.
"… she couldn’t take credit because
she hadn’t meant to do it; she had thought she was just repeating Qing-jao’s
questions. Could she take credit
for something she did by accident?
People
should only be blamed or praised for what they meant to do. Wang-mu had always believed this
instinctively; she didn’t remember anyone ever telling it to her in so many
words. The crimes that she was
blaming Congress for were all deliberate…
But
was that what they meant to do, either?
Maybe some of them, at least, thought that they were making the universe safe
for humanity by destroying [an entire planet] – from what Wang-mu had heard about the [disease], it could mean the end of all Earthborn life if it ever started
spreading world to world among human beings…[spoiler]…Maybe they all had good
purposes in mind for the terrible things they did.
Certainly
Qing-jao had a good purpose in mind, didn’t she? So how could Wang-mu condemn
her for her actions, when she thought she was obeying the gods?
Didn’t
everybody have some noble purpose in mind for their own actions? Wasn’t
everybody, in their own eyes, good?
Except
me, thought Wang-mu. In my own
eyes, I’m foolish and weak. But
they spoke of me as if I were better than I ever thought. Master Han praised me, too. And those others spoke of Qing-jao with
pity and scorn- and I’ve felt those feelings toward her, too. Yet isn’t Qing-jao acting nobly, and me
basely? I betrayed my mistress. S
he has been loyal to her government and to her gods, which are real to her,
though I no longer believe in them.
How can I tell the good people from the bad if the bad people all have
some way of convincing themselves that they’re trying to do good even though
they’re doing something terrible?
And the good people can believe that they’re actually very bad even
thought they’re doing something good?
Maybe
you can only do good if you think you’re bad, and if you think you’re good then
you can only do bad.
But
the paradox was too much for her.
There’d be no sense in the world if you had to judge people by the opposite
of how they tried to seem. Wasn’t it possible for a good person
also to try to seem good? And
just because somebody claimed to be scum didn’t mean that he wasn’t scum.
Was there any way to judge people, if you can’t judge even by their
purpose?
Was
there any way for Wang-mu to judge even herself?
Half
the time I don’t even know the purpose of what I do. I came to this house because I was ambitious and wanted to
be a secret maid to a rich godspoken girl. It was pure selfishness on my part, and pure generosity that
led Qing-jao to take me in. And
now here I am helping Master Han commit treason – what is my purpose in that? I don’t even know why I do what I do. How can I know what other people’s true
purposes are? There’s no hope of
ever knowing good from bad.
She
sat up in lotus position on her mat and pressed her face into her hands. It was as if she felt herself pressed
against a wall, but it was a wall that she made herself, and if she could only
find a way to move it aside – the way she could move her hands away from her
face whenever she wanted – then she could easily push through to the truth.
She
moved her hands away. She opened
her eyes …
She
remembered Wiggin telling her what the gods would be like. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them. Why would he say such a thing? How could he know what a god would be?
Somebody
who wants to teach you how to know everything that they know and do everything
that they do – what he was really describing was parents, not gods.
Only
there were plenty of parents who didn’t do that. Plenty of parents who tried to keep their children down, to
control them, to make slaves of them.
Where she had grown up, Wang-mu had seen plenty of that.
So
what Wiggin was describing wasn’t parents really. He was describing good
parents. He wasn’t telling her
what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was. To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the
good things that you have. And to
spare them the bad things if you can.
That was goodness.
What were gods, then? They would want everyone else to know and have and be all
good things. They would teach and
share and train, but never force.
Like
my parents, thought Wang-mu.
Clumsy and stupid sometimes, like all people, but they were good. They really did look out for me. Even sometimes when they made me do
hard things because they knew it would be good for me. Even sometimes when they were wrong,
they were good. I can judge them
by their purpose after all.
Everybody calls their purpose
good, but my parents’ purposes really were good, because they meant all their acts toward me to
help me grow wiser and stronger and better. Even when they made me do hard things because they knew I
had to learn form them. Even when
they caused me pain.
Labels: book
Life of Pi
First written 6/12/2010; posted now for the upcoming movie debut:
Life of Pi was a strange book, but I was struck by many of its observations. I was never able to forget it was a novel though. Being fully engrossed in a story is important to me when reading a novel; however, the second story that the author tells towards the end makes me wonder if he wished for the reader never to forget that the nature of this tale is a story. There were a few constructions and settings that remain beyond my comprehension as to why he used them at all; so perhaps a deeper meaning to the whole tale escapes me. It is supposed to be a novel about God, but for the life and love of me, I didn't see God in it. Here are some exerpts I did find interesting:
On working life:
... a [neck] tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
On zoos:
Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity with an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. What is the meaning of freedom in such a context? Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time, nor in their personal relations. In theory - that is, as a simple physical possibility - an animal could pick up and go, flaunting all the social conventions and boundaries proper to its species. But such an event is less likely to happen than for a member of our own species, say a shopkeeper with all the usual ties - to family, to friends, to society - to drop everything and walk away from his life with only the spare change in his pockets and the clothes on his frame. If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, won't wander from place to place, a stranger to all, beholden to none, why woud an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative? For that is what animals are, conservative, one might even say reactionary. The smallest changes can upset them. They want things to be just so, day after day, month after month. Surprises are highly disagreeable to them. You see this in their spatial relations. An animal inhabits its space, whether in a zoo or in the wild, in the same way chess pieces move about a chessboard - significantly. There is no more happenstance, no more "freedom", involved in the whereabouts of a lizard or a bear or a deer than in the location of a knight on a chessboard. Both speak of pattern and purpose.
[I personally can definitely concur with how daunting it is to find food when I first come to a new region or country. Even if I speak the language, and know where the market is, the relatively same system as I've found elsewhere can prove overwhelming at first!]
On agnosticism:
If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
On change:
All living things contain a measure of madnes that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
About Churches:
It was a building unremittingly unrevealing of what it held inside, with thick, featurelss walls pale blue in colour and high, narrow windows impossible to look in through. A fortress.
Labels: book
Oryx and Crake
(the main character is in review of the society he lost, one that sounds like it could be in our near future):
"When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase? But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance."
- Margaret Atwood
Labels: book
Rabbit, Run
I recently finished this book by John Updike. It was interesting, but even more interesting than the book itself was that it reached such critical acclaim. It seems from online research that each book in the series came out at a time when its main issue particularly resonated with the common person of the day. That is even more amazing. The book was so predictable and yet I was never sure what was going to happen. It was quite suspenseful and depressing.
Here are two interesting passages:
[response to the doctor's news of a normal baby from the expectant father]
"That's wonderful. Thank you. Good grief, thank you."
Dr. Crowe stands there smiling uneasily. Coming up from the pit of creation, he stammers in the open air. Strane: in these last hours he has been closer to Janice [the wife] than Harry ever was, has been grubbing with his hands in her roots, riding her body in its earthquake, yet he has brought back nothing to confide, no curse, no blessing. Harry dreads that the doctor's eyes will release with thunder the mystery they have absorbed; but Crowe's gaze contains no wrath. Not even a reprimand. He seems to see Harry as just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he spends his life trying to reap.
----
[then when Harry takes his older child to the park]
Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
----
fun stuff, huh? (to be read with strong, bitter sarcasm)
Labels: book
