The Fix

I think we’re all in a pot of water.  I don’t think anyone expected to be here, with a crazy president, a pandemic, protests, a collapsing economy and 3 hobbit movies that were all so bad.

I think a lot of personal recessions are going to happen.  The have not will suffer more, but not in any shocking way, just more.  The middle class will carry on, but continue to resent what feels like a life less than what they imagined.  I guess this is especially true for many white Americans who were really clearly at the top of the food chain.  The thing about being on top is usually you’re standing on the backs of others.  This isn’t a condemnation of white people, lord knows they’re getting a lot heaped on them these days.  

Our values have been replaced with the value we place on the things around us.  If you’re poor you’re likely to stay poor, this is cause you can’t usually afford to not be poor. If you’re middle class you have a good chance of staying middle class, but you’re likely to be your own worst enemy, if you’re wealthy, you’re likely to stay wealthy.  This is the class system, it doesn’t look the same as how the British had to deal with it, which was transparent, still a barrier though.  The Indian people are even more nuanced about it with their caste system.  In America we’ve always been this land of opportunity.  We were always a racist land, we always also believed in class, but if you found some way to make money we weren’t mad at you. 

The thing with values though is that we all want. We all want it to be better.  Even when we minimize, we want a better minimum.  The reason why giving up things is considered enlightenment and hard to achieve is because we have things.  And all things are not the same, there is version after version of everything and they’re either cheaper or more expensive.  Our values have been rewired to focus on our wants.  There is so much fuckery going on here in the US that no one wants to hear the “You can do it” speech.  No one wants me going on a tear about the poor and how they could if they just… I know better, it is a more complicated, at the very least a more nuance discussion.  

I’m gonna really muddy the water and say that we are held back by our lack of imagination,  there really is this truth we lack an understanding of. 

Growing up upper lower class it was made plain that if I was clean, carried myself in a respectable way, and worked hard, I could succeed.  They weren’t wrong. No one told me race wasn’t going to be an issue, everyone made plain it was a huge issue, i just had to live with it.

Growing up poor also taught me to think the good life is luxurious. Just to be clear, the good life is luxurious, it just doesn’t feel like that, once you get used to it. Once you get into the good life you’re always tempted with nicer versions of everything.  You don’t take things for granted when you’re poor.  Sometimes the fridge is empty when you’re poor.  Clothes are finite,  you have one “good outfit” and shoes. I looked ok for school and each year I had a clean outfit that wasn’t threadbare, that was for going to special places, to see family and such.  Growing up poor taught me not to take anything for granted. I grew up rich in dignity, that was pretty surprising since a teenager raised me and I usually saw my dad a few times a year. 

People are ill prepared with leaving their comfort zone.  I moved away from what I knew and was transplanted to the south.  When I came here in eighties the whites around me were in some form of middle class living and the blacks were just trying not to draw attention to themselves, they seemed in a place and worn down. The integrated form of southern racism was far worse than the segregated racism of the midwest that I came from. 

The fix is done in broad daylight and all we have to do is oppose it, we’ve not been good at that lately. They keep taking cause we let them. I think everyone should protest, but I also think everyone should vote, I think before we burn everything down, we should just change it with participation, there are more of us than them, we’re just not putting the right effort into it.