Personal Politics and Poverty
Last night one of the ’unattractive’ cashiers asked me if I could ‘fix’ her tablet PC she bought on Craig’s list and I agreed to do so. During the course of the evening I had two familiar faces from the university come down my lane while I was bagging groceries. The first was my favorite fitness instructor who always brightens my day with those impeccable tan abs. “I just finished teacher a class and I am really tired and hungry,” she said to the cashier. The cashier who is husky said she was doing some of those same exercises at home today but obviously not getting the same results. The instructor asked her to take her class. A few more hours passed and between going outside and getting the grocery carts and bagging I was not paying too much attention until another cute woman who I knew from the university showed up in my lane with her little boy. Before she had the baby she had the body of a goddess and the face of an angel. All the guys in the computer support office were always trying to get her number but she had a boyfriend at the time. “I am trying to squeeze between this grocery cart and the register but I am not quite thin enough anymore,” she said to me. “I remember when you were so tiny,” I said. Then I realized I had just called her fat and I felt my cheeks glow with embarrassment. She just kept on smiling, although, just below the surface her fist were winding up to give me a punch in the nuts. We made polite conversation for the few minutes it took for me to bag her food. This is a person I have known since I was 18 years old so we have some history. After I asked her how the servers were doing at work, she gingerly walked over to the customer service desk and stood. That is when I saw my opportunity to show that I was once gainfully employed to my cashier. I waved ‘Jane’ over from the customer service desk and she walked over to see what I wanted. “Can you tell this cashier that I am qualified to service her tablet PC?” “He is really good with computers,” she said. After she left the cashier asked me what happened. “How do you go from being a computer analyst to a bagger making minimum wage?” I did know if I could answer this question in a way that she could understand easily. When you have a staggering statistic of middle-class America falling rapidly into poverty it does make sense to people who have always been on food stamps. She is the same person who told me to apply for food stamps because they are free. I tried to explain to her very simply that the economy does support as many high paying jobs as it once had. I know I did not get too far with her because she is simple and in her world all the government handouts to the poor cost society nothing. I don’t believe in the democrat philosophies that got Obama elected with a strong showing from the people that are currently on welfare or will receive it ‘long term’. I believe the government’s role in a person’s life should only come as is necessary and should not be seen as constant provider. I also understand that there are certain jobs that come with the burden of ‘eternal poverty’. I was thinking about this the other day while I sat on the toilet, how we have a great need in this country for ‘unthinking’ jobs and unless we are willing to keep those jobs around many people may fall into a life time of welfare. These are simple jobs that most Americans will not do anymore (farming) and some which they want to do but have not been given the opportunity to do anymore. There are entire sections of the country which have been devastated by poverty because their ‘unthinking’ jobs in factories and manufacturing were sent to the Asian countries for greater corporate profits. When a community thrives on a specific labor force it cannot adjust itself to the loss of those jobs readily. This is what people in the political arena are failing to address or they don’t see it as a big problem. As America switched to a knowledge based economy it must have forgotten that the average IQ is 100. It could take many generations to put all people into hiring levels of employment in America. We still need people to work crappy jobs but we also need those people paying taxes, which leads to the ultimate dilemma, how do you get a person to pay taxes doing ‘unthinking’ work? I don’t have a good answer for this question because the corporations have done a masterful job of convincing average IQ America that their products will cost more if they were made here, so much more that they might not be able to afford them (while keeping corporate profits soaring). Yesterday I noticed the tag on my uniform shirt reads “made in China” and I felt like taking the tag off and pinning to the front of my shirt.
