I confess: I broke my vow to never, ever watch John Stossel last night in order to see all my worst fears confirmed about the way things really work. I watched Privilege in America, or yet another Nip/Tuck Ugly Betty Devil Wore Prada HOWL about how pretty rich people have it better. Stossel hit all the highlights of the brewing revolt of the fairly rich (usually posing as the “middle class”), though he carefully avoided talking about the 35.9 million Americans living in poverty whose underpaid labor has long subsidized the middle class lifestyle.
I haven’t been around for a few weeks because I’m really tired. But let me offer this twist: I’m tired because of the efforts of well-meaning people who care about me. As usually, the conversation finally came around to why a bright, highly-skilled, and very nice person like me can’t get work in a booming economy. Since no one feels they can do anything about BushCo’s rigged numbers, the diagnosis was it’s all my fault: I don’t try hard enough, I’m not putting enough time and money to make myself attractive, and I’m not making a major effort to socialize.
After looking longingly at my various unfinished creative projects, my only source of happiness, I subordinated myself to the outlook of my friends who “know better” in that truthiness kind of way.
I made an effort to go out more and meet people. This is inevitably pretty painful for me, because bar-hopping is expensive for someone who has no regular income, and the historical record shows that the investment will be futile. I make very few friends this way - but I do get to go through a lot of rejection, a lot of people overtly leaving me off their lists for group gatherings even when I finally stop hoping to be embraced and ask to be included, and occasionally a few people who take serious advantage of my needy position.
The reason this happens is that I’m seen as someone who has nothing to offer. This isn’t about my confidence or paranoia or any other psychological trickiness. It’s about the cold fact that I’m not that attractive, I don’t have money or other forms of class access, I don’t have many social connections or any influence, and whatever talent, skills, or intelligence I have don’t matter because they aren’t expressed in a social context. This isn’t the distorted perceptions of someone who lacks confidence. This isn’t paranoia. It’s the plain truth, and frankly it hurts me more when people try to pretend that this is something I can overcome with a little extra effort and a makeover.
This reject-status doesn’t just mean I’m not invited to the party - it means I don’t even get the benefit of the relationships I pay for. I spent seven years of graduate school trying to get an advisor for my dissertation. I would go into professor’s office hours with a raft full of questions and potential contributions and avid interest in their work…to be met with icy silence - and the experience of listening to the next student be treated very differently while I gathered my books out in the hall. It wasn’t because I lacked merit or was deficient in my academic work - it was because I couldn’t bring the fellowships, connections, or any other sign of a “bright future” to those professors. I wore myself down trying to fight the administrator of my department who did everything in his power to make me drop out (and he eventually succeeded).
In fact, my harrowing experience with graduate school is why my hair was prematurely gray before I hit thirty. It’s from nutritional deficiencies related to several starvation periods because I didn’t have an advisor to sponsor me for work in my own department. This gray hair is now one of my “social deficits” that well-meaning people insist that I have to “fix” - i.e., though I’m usually out of work, I should be paying to have my hair professionally dyed and styled on a regular basis. Dishing out blame isn’t going to help anything - I just need to accept the fact that poor people who have had their looks hijacked by society have to pay more to meet society’s standards of attractiveness.
So after seeing my attempts at socializing weren’t really working, and just draining the little IRA I started while working and attempting to be a good citizen, my friends started getting antsy about what else I should do…i.e. my hair, my nails, my weight, my teeth, better-fitting clothes. When all their hinting didn’t lead to a shopping spree and a makeover, the hints became a “birthday present”. I got my hair professionally done, and now I have to put up with the constant pressure to keep paying to “keep it up”. I bet the “present” to get my nails done is just around the corner.
My hair does look better…but it’s not doing anything to change my life. It’s not getting me “over the top” in job interviews. The people who were repulsing me from their social circles are still repulsing me.
The thing is, I could have told my well-meaning friends this wouldn’t work in advance. I know because I’ve been through this over, and over, and over again. Everytime I meet someone new, they look at my sorry condition in life and try to figure out what I can do to help myself. This usually involves a regimen of (expensive) self-improvement and socialization. These people project what worked for them onto me. This usually comes with an urban legend about how a poor thirty-fourth cousin invested their last dollar in a nice suit, talked themselves up, engaged in some telephone-rounds scam where they told each person that someone else “wanted them” or “already agreed to it”, and ended up with a plum job/promotion/book deal/angel investor/etc.
Worst of all, these friends are demanding that I shut down my ability to learn from the past. As much as the U.S. has promoted a society of continuous learning, our dirty secret is we don’t want anyone learning anything if their experience tells them to stop jumping through the social hoops that work for the top ten percent. All of that good advice doled out to people to be confident, to network, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and not let the bastards get them down…that’s all about defying the record of experience. Repressing your memories and functioning as if you haven’t experienced rejection doing the same thing ten times over is really, really hard work. It’s draining. I’d even propose this is a root cause of major depression.
However, I go through the motions because the well-meaning self-appointed life coach will be my friend as long as I do what they say. Pointing out the truth will be end of that relationship.
In sum, emulating privilege is not going to make me privileged. Not everyone can be privileged. Everyone is trying to optimize their social networks and maximize their filters for a good reason: the current social scenario is that you have to be privileged just to survive. However, the privileged cannot exist, by definition, without the not-privileged. And there’s not a virtuous circulation of privilege that gives everyone a turn, either. Privilege breeds more privilege and lack of privilege accumulates the problems that keep you down.
As the Victorians used to say, the Poor Will Always Be With Us.
Some people like me get filtered out. Automatically. It’s time to DEAL WITH IT.
Everyone wants to be communicators and visionaries, to “raise awareness” of problems that everyone already knows about. All of this is tap-dancing around the core issue: redistribution of wealth. No one wants to talk about solutions because it involves dirty words like taxes and the image of Big Brother reaching into your wallet to filch your hard-earned money.
The only way to solve problems like mine, though, is to guarantee a minimum survival kit, including either the right to work or the right to be subsidized when you’re denied work. This is the point where people’s eyes usually glaze over and they start talking about Magical Macroeconomics. And that’s where the people who have not only fallen through the cracks, but are being held down there, start to hear nothing but, “Blah, blah, blah…” There is no dodging the ultimate truth: if there’s no work and no subsidy for not working, then people starve and die. All other options besides guaranteeing work or subsidies for no work make us a country of murderers. Dropping dead of stress and preventable disease is just as bad as holding a gun up to them and shooting them. Diffusing responsibility throughout society changes nothing for a dead person.
Redistribution of wealth is not about ideology, it’s about fairness. It’s about giving back some of the hay you made out of your privileges, and doing it in a way that hits everyone’s pockets in a fair way. It’s about recognizing that our social system runs on privilege and filtering. And it’s about realizing that trying to force people to adjust their attitudes to compensate for homelessness or hunger is a form of mental torture. Let’s strive to be a better country than that, and vote for the political representatives who want us to be a better country than that.
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