Notes

[feuervogel]

I may have something to say about this poor middle class girl's problems at some point. Just putting it here so I can find it again later.

Comments

[thesmallwonder.livejournal.com]

To be fair as I understand it from knowing her, she grew up ass poor and was homeless for quite a while in her late teens.

The more you know.

[thesmallwonder.livejournal.com]

Or not, reading that. But I am pretty certain she was homeless for awhile, though now it makes me wonder if it was self inflicted.

[feuervogel]

It's probably not because her parents with money lost their large, immaculate house.

The house I grew up in wasn't spotless, and I had no expectations of owning a huge, immaculate house in some hoity-toity neighborhood. I was jealous of the people I knew from school who had those things. The chain that binds her is class.

I just need to come up with a post that expands on that without sounding like sour grapes or personal dislike. An I didn't dream of dragons for the working class.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Mine was huge, but a mess. And I didn't dream of owning a huge house myself. But I do understand the worries about a general trend of this generation falling behind the last generation. That is a valid point, even if it's ridiculous to think everyone should be able to buy a nice, large, pretty house.

[feuervogel]

Ours were modest: half a duplex, a one-story rancher-style, a 3-story townhouse, and they were never immaculate. The floor and furniture was covered with dog hair. My room in the rancher was a wreck, but when we moved to the townhouse, I had to keep much tidier, because my room was 10x10. I didn't even have a desk in there and did all my homework on the bed.

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure the chain that binds her is class. One major binder that I see is that we have a culture which tells kids that all they need to do to find well-paying employment is graduate from college.

"Follow your heart" sounds great, but an engineering or science degree is way more likely to pay the bills than an art history degree. For that matter, vocational school for plumbing or HVAC is more likely to pay the bills than many university degrees.

[feuervogel]

I think class factors into that a bit, though. Really poor kids may hear that, but they'll think, pfft, as if I could even go to college.

Oh, trust me. I know that so damn well. That's why I have a BS in chemistry and a PharmD, while what I really want to do is study German language and literature. And write fiction.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Oh, we do have issues. We are facing the worse economic times in my mother's lifetime (not my father's, since he was alive for the Great Depression) and the economy has had huge job loss. Depending on which segment of the job market you wanted, you may have been hit by the tech bubble bursting, which is what totally derailed me and darch in our twenties. We could have managed either the tech bubble bursting or me becoming disabled, but having both happen at the same time was a disaster only survivable through the charity of family.

But, on the other hand, I strongly suspect her parents were white. Those cheap homes and many of those programs and even some of those decent union protections often were only available to white Americans. The picture looked rather different for many other people.

But I do worry about the extent to which we toss away hard-earned union protections. We forget the value of unions, and many jobs don't have them. We allow corporations huge amounts of power with little checks, and the pendulum swings back and forth, and sometimes it swings too far toward employers being able to take horrible advantage of employees. Given the economy being crap (although fortunately not as badly as it could have been) you're going to see tons of people struggling with few options and having to accept virtually anything just to survive. That is a problem.

It also doesn't help that the minimum educational level the average job expects of its employees has increased over time, but government support for higher education has lagged behind. Plus, since you need to spend more time becoming educated, that is less time working and building up an income, so of course you're behind on where past generations were at your age. So, of course people delay having children til later (if they intend to have them) and buy houses later (if they can ever afford to do so) and so forth. Unfortunately, our culture hasn't really properly adjusted to a longer educational period for its young to better allow people to actually start settling down in young adulthood. We would need much greater support of young adults from the older generation than we currently have to balance losing a few years of income-building + usually doing it in a way that acquires large amounts of debt. But for some reason, people don't want to help the younger generations have a base from which to build.

So, I think she is touching on some points that do reflect on real issues. But the picture is really quite different if your ancestors weren't white.

[feuervogel]

Cat is 5-10 years younger than us, and was in college when the tech bubble burst.

The issues she discusses are real, but she presents her upbringing as this sort of universal experience, and ... no. That wasn't my experience at all. This thread makes an attempt to get at that, and Cat sort of brushes it off.

That people in the past could help younger generations is mostly a function of class. The only reason I didn't grow up in a housing project was because my grandfather has a PhD and worked for NIH. My family had one generation of upward mobility (factory workers/farmers -> PhD) then one generation back down (secretary, mechanic). My generation is the same level as our parents, for the most part, except 3/4 of us have college degrees & they don't.

Her "expectations to go to college, buy a big house, keep it spotless" are so foreign to me they may as well be from Mars.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah. If she's expecting everyone to be able to buy a house, that's ridiculous. If she's just focusing on a downward trend, she's not totally off base. Her expectations are based on class.

When I said the older generation needs to help the younger, I didn't mean from family to family really. I mean more that we need to do things like make college accessible to everyone the way high school is supposed to be and is still more accessible than college. That sort of thing. The culture needs to adapt.

After all, I totally support tax systems that help people get a better start in life. But a lot of people view things like a college education or health care or food to eat as luxuries that we shouldn't be giving poorer kids, and the odds really are further stacked against them than they used to be if they are white. It's a different picture though for other races and more complex. I'm not sure how it all plays out. On the one hand, the laws tend to be less racially biased and jobs may still be biased, but the bias has decreased. On the other hand, the criminal justice system is definitely racially biased. But it was before too. I just don't know enough to say. But I do know those nice housing opportunities weren't going to Black families generally.

I do worry though. We are in the midst of a huge economic crisis, and it is hitting the people who have just come out of high school and are looking for jobs or those who have been able to go to college but just got out really hard. My nieces are young adults, and the job market is a disaster for their age. There are too many people with more experience who are out of work. It's an incredibly hard time to be a young adult. Much harder than I think it was for my age group. Although, I admit, my concerns aren't about whether they will be able to buy houses. I don't want to see my niece having to go through something like I did where she's struggling to get enough money just to stay alive and keep a roof over her head and the heads of her family. And she pretty much already is in that situation, but it's more a question of how on the edge will that become and for how long? It will only take one unlucky break for her to be screwed for years. So, I'm sitting here really hoping she doesn't end up with any.