busyBarbara Ehrenreich | This Land Is Their Land In a portion from her latest book, excerpted in The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich writes: "I took a little vacation recently--nine hours in Sun Valley, Idaho, before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with Swiss-style bakery, multistar restaurant and 'opera house.' What luck--the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale! Nature and commerce were conspiring to make this the perfect micro-vacation. But as I approached the stores things started to get a little sinister--maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton's closet?--because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases. Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in effect since sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there. All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions--a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast."
In this regard, the rich people are painting themselves into a corner that even they are going to find very uncomfortable. As gas prices continue to rise, they'll find (as many employers are finding) that poor people can't afford to drive to work across the distances between open jobs and affordable housing. I've seen businesses go down because of that.
Lest we blame the whole mess on the rich, however, let's not forget that 1) America is still allegedly a democracy, 2) the poor vastly outnumber the rich, and 3) people who vote against their own economic self-interest because they want to creep into the winning side someday are contributing to the problem. Economic segregation is not any better than racial segregation, for anyone. And we won't have a healthy mix of homes and businesses unless people at all income levels work to make that happen.
June 18 2008, 16:03:12 UTC 13 years ago
This imposes a sense of guilt and failure on the poor and encourages that kind of anti-self-interest behavior. Rich =/= good, despite popular myths to the contrary.
June 18 2008, 16:48:42 UTC 13 years ago
June 19 2008, 03:57:11 UTC 13 years ago
June 19 2008, 17:21:54 UTC 13 years ago
June 18 2008, 22:49:09 UTC 13 years ago
Even if they make the time to watch what's happening, how many people have the intelligence and sophistication to see and understand what's actually happening behind hours of glitter and spin, when the rich folk spend millions to bamboozle them?
Yes, I was frustrated to hear people say, "well Bush also says taking care of the environment is a good thing, just like Gore is saying, so that's not a reason to choose Gore". So we ended up with things like a "Clean Air Act" that allowed more pollution to be spewed into the air. But unless you looked at more than just the stump speeches--if you could FIND more, it's not as if the rich-folk-owned news media were providing that background info--they did seem to be saying very similar things about the environment.
I guess my main point is that you can't place all the blame on the people who believed a lie. The person who told the lie (or, if you prefer, who spun the truth to or past the point of distortion) has the prior responsibility.
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Re: Charles Lambchop and a Modest Proposal
June 19 2008, 16:41:36 UTC 13 years ago
1) Imagine the emotional atmosphere as similar to the weather. Even if you are standing inside a warm, dry house not getting wet yourself, you will still be affected by the weather outside -- even if it rains miles upstream from you, a flood can roll downstream and wash away your house. When the emotional weather becomes gloomy, it can rain on your parade; when it gets bad enough, it can wash away shelter and swamp even the determinedly isolated. Rich people may not feel personal despair from the economic upheavals, but if enough other people do, that will eventually rain on their parade in some fashion. And the more oblivious they are, the less warning they will have and the less they'll be able to cope with it.
2) Neither the infrastructure nor the culture is set up for that kind of coliving. The infrastructure could be rebuilt; that can't be done instantly, though. The culture, well ... people don't like to make big changes like that. They might try it. But they won't have the necessary skills to make it work properly. When people try new things quickly because they're desperate, the results are rarely felicitous. They might hack out a functional system eventually, but they will almost certainly go through some very unpleasant territory along the way.
3) If they succeed in making it work, it will change a lot of things. And one result will be a different way of mixed-income living. There are ways in which coliving with servants can actually be made to work in a fashion gratifying for everyone. Who knows, maybe the damn pig will fly -- sometimes people become startlingly flexible when their life sucks, in pursuit of a configuration that won't suck.
They've already painted themselves into a corner. They can stand there and gibber, they can walk over the wet paint, they can wait for the paint to dry, they can try to find a board to walk out over ... but that's the situation, and there aren't a lot of low-stress options.