The Federal Government’s Department of Health and Human Services has developed “poverty guidelines.” So if you aspire to officially escape poverty as they define it in America, you just need to keep your wages above those limits. For an individual, the amount is $10,210. (Where do they get that extra ten bucks, anyway? Why can’t they call it $10,250, or even 10,500?) Add roughly $3480 for each member of the family. A family of five is “poverty level” if their income is under $24,130.
Does all this mean a family making $24,130.01 is middle class today?
Business and industry leaders want the economic engine to be lean and powerful, so for a long time, American labor has been “ramped up” in efficiency. It has been starved of wages, stripped of “extra” laborers, and made to work more hours per week, and then more yet, and a little more, until we have now become the hardest-working people in the world.
Life in this country has been compared to a climb up a ladder. We don’t all start at the bottom, of course, but some do, and according to legend, all have the same opportunity to move up. Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, that the rungs on that ladder have been greased, and it is becoming more and more difficult to get traction on them. That sad fact is no accident. It is the result of profit-hungry business and industry leaders “restructuring” the workplace, reducing the workforce, and maintaining productivity, while at the same time enlisting help from the government to keep the economic engine purring.
But the economic engine has been forced to run lean for much too long, and now it’s starving of fuel. Americans are working harder than ever, but as a society, we’re not making very good progress. Retirement plans are disappearing. Investments by common working people have been hijacked by the rich and powerful. Too much of the money has been siphoned away and invested overseas, or it’s sitting in offshore banks, where it’s safe from the IRS. The nation ranks 34th in the world in healthcare. The banking industry was allowed to sell the public some pretty shaky mortgages over the past several years, and now we have a credit crisis. People simply don’t have as much extra money to spend as they used to. Recession is imminent, and some fear that maybe it will be worse than a recession this time.
According to the myth, in the Land of Opportunity, success is limited only by an individual’s willingness to learn and work hard. Now, young college graduates, some with advanced degrees, are competing with former employees of industry, middle-aged, middle management types, for positions at information technology call-in centers, to work afternoon or graveyard shifts, for entry-level wages.
When they land those jobs and make $20,000 a year, are they really called “middle-class”?
I’m afraid I’ve always defined the middle class differently. For a while in my early years, before Dad lost his job, my family was middle class. My dad never graduated from high school and was not exceptionally literate, but he lived a good life. He was a very, very good man. His life was almost as adventurous as the lives of some famous characters from American literature. Like Huck Finn, he grew up without a mother and escaped his abusive father by leaving home before he was fifteen. Like Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, he spent his youth and most of his early adult years traveling from farm to farm doing all sorts of work. He used to tell stories of how he traveled the Dakotas, Montana, and Nebraska, sheering sheep for a few weeks here, picking potatoes there, harvesting, planting, and putting up hay. He learned skills along the way, rough carpentry, mechanics, and of course, farming and ranching.
He was a bit lonely at times, but happy on the whole. At the ridiculous age of 48, he got married. Then I was born, in 1952. He needed to find steady work, and he heard of jobs available in the iron mines of Northern Minnesota. He applied and was hired on as a common laborer.
Suddenly, we joined the American middle class. He worked at his job forty hours a week and came home with a paycheck. He had time to be with his family, get caught up with a few projects around the house, read the paper, sleep in, and even visit with me and my sister and brother, who came along in 1954 and 1956. He entertained us with many, many stories of his adventures.
He and Mom rented a house, and later, bought a small farm. The bills got paid, and he was able to, in his words, “put some of it away” in savings. Dad didn’t own his farm yet, but he could keep up with the mortgage, and he had benefits: a good health plan, a retirement plan, and vacation time. With his financial obligations, Dad couldn’t buy a new vehicle, but he bought used cars one after another. He fixed each one up and kept fixing and driving it until it broke beyond fixing. He began to expand his “hobby” farm. Farming was his first love, and he wanted nothing more than to own his land and prosper on it. Dad spent every free minute away from work, including vacation time, building his dream. People had time to do that, back then.
Mom stayed home and raised kids. When we were a little older, she could have gone to work, but she didn’t have to. They had enough income from Dad’s job, so we milked the cows, drank as much skim milk as we wanted, fed what was left over to the calves and pigs, and sold the cream. There was plenty to do on the farm, and Mom took care of the animals while Dad was away working in the mines.
We were middle class. Dad chose our lifestyle, which wasn’t the easiest, and to be honest, it was considered odd for the times, but our situation was steadily improving. Our family of five lived comfortably on one income. The breadwinner of the family sometimes worked a little overtime, but not too often, and hardly ever beyond fifty hours. The breadwinner’s job gave the family opportunities to raise its standard of living while providing Dad enough time off to enjoy the company of his wife and kids and pursue other interests.
It was not a perfect life. Farming in Northern Minnesota on little fields cut out of forests was hard work. We didn’t have a hay bailer, or even a good tractor. Our “tractor” was a doodlebug, a Nineteen Twenty-something Ford Model T engine and transmission adapted to a second transmission and rear end of a truck, vintage 1930’s, brand unknown. Dad and I mowed hay together. He pulled a horse mower, which I rode and operated. We raked it in a similar manner, with a buck rake that dumped it into windrows. We went back later with the rake, bunched the windrows, and then hauled it loose on a two-wheeled trailer with a hayrack on it. We used pitchforks to move hay and stack it in a fenced yard by the barn.
We didn’t have indoor plumbing or running water, so laundry day was a tremendous amount of work for Mom. She carried water buckets from a pump to the house, heated it on either a wood cook stove or a gas range, and then washed clothes in an old Sears wringer washer. We didn’t have a phone, either. That made us feel a little isolated at times, but comfortably insulated also, from the business of town life.
In the early 1960’s most people neither appreciated nor put up with such inconveniences, but country living had its beautiful moments too. Dad maintained two huge gardens, tilling them frequently and weeding them meticulously. They were located right beside the gravel road that ran by our place, one on the north side of the house, and one on the south side. When we didn’t have rain for long periods, we had to water the gardens, but because Dad was always afraid of the well going dry, we hauled water in fifty gallon barrels on a trailer from a river two miles away, and with pails of river water, we went carefully, gently, row by row, watering each plant. On the cool midsummer evenings, when the corn was getting tall and the beet rows and bean rows and carrots and peas and cucumber plants and squash plants and everything else was screaming out a glorious green in the twilight, and when bright blue little potato blossoms bloomed, we knew we were in a good place.
Mom had three brothers who visited frequently and behaved strangely. They were all veterans of World War II and worked as iron miners, like Dad. They’d grown up on a little farm not twenty miles from ours, and they would just come out at different times to walk around and remember what it was like. “How’s the old Model T running?” they’d ask. “We used to have a chicken coop just like this,” they’d say, or, “Our barn was made of logs too, and that’s just how we’d stack the hay.” At times, they’d even become a little emotional with sentiment, but that was embarrassing to them, so usually, they didn’t say much at first arrival. They just wore these dreamy little smiles and walked around a bit. Then they came in and visited a while.
Mom would fix a lunch for them, and maybe a neighbor or two would drop in, and maybe someone would bring a little wine. These kinds of visits were rare, but pretty regular. We kids would sometimes pause from our play and greet the people, but we learned that it was usually best to leave mom’s brothers alone when they were in that dreamy mood. Uncle George was particularly interesting. He used to come out just to lie down under a tree and take naps. He said the wind in the trees, the chirping of birds, and the buzz of insects gave him the best rest in the world.
Our nearest neighbors were a mile or so away. Another much less frequent visitor owned land on the adjoining forty. He wasn’t middle class; he was upper middle class. We’ll call him Mr. D. He didn’t live out there beside us, but he had a small hunting cabin on a forty-acre field that had been cut out of the woods. He owned a car dealership in town, much further off, about fifteen miles away, and we’d very seldom see him. He let Dad cut the hay off his field two or three times a year. He had a garden out there, too. We had a devil of a time keeping our cows fenced up and out of both his garden and ours.
Once your neighbor’s cows get a taste of garden plants, they look for any weakness in the barbed wires and pry their way under or over them if they can. If one staple pulls loose, they’re quickly out of the pasture and in the garden eating your cabbages. That’s when Mr. D. would come to visit.
Mr. D. was an understanding neighbor, though, and he and Dad got along pretty well. Eventually, after the cows had eaten Mr. D’s turnips and cabbages and lettuce a few times, we put four or five barbed wires, instead of the standard two or three, on the fence separating our properties, and the cows ceased to be a problem.
By word of mouth through the car dealer and my uncles, news got out about our old-fashioned little farm nestled in the trees, and you know what they say, “If you build it, they will come.” People actually took country drives, particularly on quiet summer evenings, to come and gawk. There was nothing special about our place from our standpoint, but many of the townsfolk were no doubt just as consumed by sentiment as my uncles were, looking at the ancient Model T, sometimes even seeing Dad or me cranking it up or driving it, backing the mower or rake or trailer to park it under the trees. They would admire the straight fences, the well-kept little lawn in front of the house, the huge round haystacks near the log barn farther back in the woods, the chickens running free, and the beautiful, fragrant gardens.
Dad resented them a little. They didn’t mean any harm. They just knew of the place and went out driving on a pleasant evening to have a look. But once in a while, they’d sneak up on him. Maybe the wind would be blowing and the birds would be singing in the soft summer twilight, and he’d be squatting in the garden with his back toward the road, farting, spitting tobacco juice, maybe blowing snot out of a nostril once in a while, while picking beans or carrots, or watering, or weeding, and talking to himself, constantly. Then he’d stand up and turn around and see two cars full of people, not fifty feet away, sitting there gawking at him, engines idling almost silently. “Cheesus!” he’d say. “Dey scare da hell out of a guy! Ya, ya! Dey just come out to look. Dey t’ink it’s nice, but dey t’ink it’s all easy, too. Dey got no idea how much work a man does to keep it up!”
Dad milked the cows in the mornings, either before leaving for work when he was on day shifts in the mines, or after returning home from working nights. Mom and I helped. We did the evening milking and chores when Dad worked afternoons. We lived simply, but we ate well. Pay checks came in. When we needed medical care, we had it. I was personally hospitalized for tonsillitis, bronchitis, a mysteriously high white blood cell count, and whooping cough. But I survived all of that because of the good medical care available to us. Our lives showed promise. Soon we would have a new well, an electric water pump, hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, and a genuine septic tank. The farm was in operation, bringing in only small cream checks so far, but it looked like we would be able to continue our slow climb upward.
No comments:
Post a Comment