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I just finished reading "The Color of Water" by James McBride, your post sounded so much one of the running themes I took from that book. It is about the author's mother, a white widow raising her 12 bi-racial children in the turbulent 60's and 70's in a New York housing project. They all graduated from college and most of them got professional degrees, and they were absolutely dirt poor.
When I hear my parents talk about growing up in a coal town in the 40s everybody was poor, but they didn't look at it the way people look at it now, as if you are only worth the amount of money and possessions you have. They all looked at each other as having enough, equally just enough. During WWII people would trade ration stamps to be able to get what was needed for their individual families. They worked together in ways like that to make sure everyone had what they needed. Going back another generation, my Grandfather used to talk about having nothing and living on a farm, but they had food and his Dad worked in the mines so their family of 9 or 10 kids still took in in 3 or 4 more children of relatives who weren't getting by at all. That's how people looked at poverty back then, whether they were getting their needs met and if others were taken care of. Now not having is simply despair, and there isn't much of a leg up for people when they become unemployed, you can't remake yourself it seems.
I tend to worry and fret over the budget of the University where I work as a secretary, I have come to cherish my job. Past are the days when I thought I had nothing being a lowly office drone, I feel like a rich person looking at all the people in this country without health care, no retirement, no income. It has really brought a lot of actual gratitude for what I have into my life. My job was and is looked at as nothing, but I feel like I have everything because I have my needs met. I didn't see it that way before the recession, I felt like I hadn't turned out well enough. A lot of attitudes are changing and changing fast. It is time we respected any and all the work people do in our country, it is time to have some actual community back. Past time. I am starting to wonder if loosing the real feeling of community might be a big reason that we have fallen so far so fast, the reason the unions have been busted and the reason it is easier to convince people that their neighbors don't deserve health care; and fool them that they won't be in the same despair as neighbors next week.
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