I was fortunate growing up in that both of my parents had decent jobs. They both worked for the same local hospital, my Father a PR man and my Mother a registered nurse. Decent - but throughout my early childhood we were probably average (or slightly upper) working class - and as I grew older my parents became more comfortably average working middle class. I learned a great deal from them, about values and principles, about the sort of person I wanted to be - about what our economy looked like for regular people... about the stress of this current economy, about, too, how so many people are forced into working at jobs they hate - to pretend to any who ask that they love them. Fake it till you make it, I guess, is the idea.
My Father worked 80-100 hours a week, nearly every week, for a number of years. My Mother was a nurse who worked nights and slept during the day, so a lot of the time my sisters and I were raised by baby sitters - or, as we got a bit older, by each other. On those race occasions (much rarer, back then) that my parents had time together, they were often frustrated from their long days and needed to vent, or relax... and children can make such things difficult. Particularly children like I was, an introverted boy who hated school thanks to constant bullying - they had to struggle every day to get me to go. I frequently ran away from home, or got into trouble for one thing or another. On one particular occasion I even got to ride to school in a police cruiser - I think I was ten.
I saw how hard it was for them. How my Father would be pulling out his hair over debts, over this issue or that issue of fund raising for the hospital, or his community endeavors. My Mother... a good nurse, loves her patients... but not so much the politics, I think she suffered from depression and anxiety.
What I learned mostly was that your average working/middle class life can be extraordinarily shitty. Most of your time spent working for people who barely appreciate you, struggling to juggle debts, child-care, house maintenance, education - and so many other things all while trying to have time to enjoy life.
I was an ignorant child (well, to be fair, I WAS a child) and I remember thinking to myself that I would never be like them. I wasn't going to work for assholes who didn't appreciate me, to sacrifice my life so I could work all day to have an hour or two at home at night... maybe. In my teens I looked into every get rich quick scheme I could think of, kept figuring... there had to be some easy way to get rich so I wouldn't have to live like my parents had. Of course it never ended up working out as I intended. Eventually I was convinced I needed at least a GED... and went to a local Jobcorps program. That really shook up my comfortable, sheltered little world... lots and lots of diversity. Meeting so many who had never had much of anything, or who had been gangsters, or who's parents had beat them bloody, or who never had much hope for anything. It began, I suppose, my maturation (such as it was - and is) into adult life.
Then, well, I became a Father. A sort of Father (my girlfriend had a young daughter, and for a long time I was a stay at home caretaker...) at seventeen - and a biological one at eighteen. I had a GED and a give em hell attitude - and not much else. Lousy jobs for terrible pay, my own history of mental illness (Post traumatic stress) and a laundry list of issues. I learned that, while middle class or working class life is hard, damned hard... it's not nearly as shitty as being working poor, or just plain poor.
I learned the meaning of struggle, of poverty. I learned what it was like to go hungry, no matter how hard you worked, how many dishes you washes, floors you swept, phone calls you made. I learned what it was like to try to keep up with laundry, house keeping chores, cooking, so many things that I had always taken for granted as a child. I guess we all have (or a lot of us at least have) that "light bulb" moment, eventually... where we say.. "Shit, I was a little creep!"
For the most part, my little fledgling family survived - just barely - because we had some help from family. When that help was at one point cut off...
I remember applying for jobs and being looked at with contempt and condescension. Simple things I could not do, like read a tape measurer... simple and glaring holes in my education and even in my personality that made me unsuited for many different types of work. I ultimately resigned myself, for years, to working in the service industry... because I was not good enough, smart enough, to do anything else.
There were days when I stole milk, even bread (how I pulled that off I'm still not entirely certain - bread is tough to hide) from a local grocery store when we were living in South Dakota. There we nights when I couldn't do anything but lay in bed feeling miserable - a failure in every important way. I could not provide the life my family deserved... that my children deserved. No matter how hard I tried, there were so very many barriers, my personal illness and lack of education being the greatest.
We applied for - and received medicaid and food stamps for a time - I was often in between jobs or working at low paying/minimum wage job, or staying home with the children because I would earn less - on a monthly basis, than childcare required. The shame became so great, so deep, so overwhelming, that it turned to self hatred, to a deep and abiding self hatred that lasted for many years. I became self destructive... irritable, twitchy, apathetic. I began to despise people - and life, in general, but not nearly so much as I despised myself.
I would think, some times, spitefully, that... "when my ship came in", I'd show them all, for mocking me, underestimating me, laughing at me. I'd show my parents, I'd show the bullies, I'd show this world that I was someone to be reckoned with, that I wasn't useless and pathetic, that I wasn't who... really, I believed I was.
The severe mental breakdown I suffered when my girlfriend and I broke up and I lost the children... it lasted for years. I never forgave myself for failing as a Father, as a fiance, as a man, even as a son to my parents. It was years in therapy, medication and other things before I was ever able to grow beyond that person. To consider... everything... more deeply, more philosophically. To learn about things like politics, economics, psychology and sociology.
I have spent the few years since my semi-recovery as a member of the working poor, uninsured, underpaid, barely educated. Yet... for all of that, I discovered faith in humanity. Through the struggles of those like me, who had suffered hardships, whether illness or poverty, who had suffered so much more. Compassion and wisdom came from some of the unlikeliest of places and people who I had once thought had nothing in common with me.
I found my heroes among the working class and the working poor. People who inspire me to greater compassion, empathy... humility and humanity every day. People who inspire me to be kind and brave, even when life is harsh and often cruel. People who demonstrate, day after day, just what it means to be a working class hero. It's something that no words can adequately describe, something that, for me, means so much more than a matter of numbers.
From my experience... painful and otherwise... I think that the sum of one's financial value has no indication as to the sum of one's value as a human being. I believe that society gives money the ultimate credit to determine the worth of the individual based on wealth - and I find that rotten to the core, absolutely despicable. I am poor, I know the poor, I work with the poor, I'm not just some statistic, or some example to be held up as an indication of why we should all get an education (though I have been that, too).
There is a... I don't know what to call it... an experience in humanity, in humility, in Eastern Nations that I have heard of. That a wealthy person will gave away all they own later in life, and become a beggar to live on the streets. Those people are pretty damned awesome, heroes in the highest way it is possible to be, deeply noble in spirit and in everything good.
Making money is tough, beyond tough for most of us - yet... being poor is harder. Living with the wages of the poor, with the feelings and the life issues that come as a result of deep poverty... thrust us into the fire, into the Soul forge, if you will... and shake us - and test us, down to our very core. If you want to know who someone is, take away all of their financial value, assets and so on... and once the kicking and screaming is over - you will see someone much closer to the truth.
Finally, to answer your question after my long rant... I believe that quote applies to us in that it presents a challenge. To NOT hate ourselves based on our financial value - to NOT hate others for the same reason. To hold neither ignorance nor contempt for others in our hearts, but to cling to empathy, to our shared compassion and humanity in the knowledge that we are all in this together. To find faith, not in external things like cash, big houses, fancy cars... but in that which has the most value... in each other.
Just my thoughts. Pardon the long-winded manner of my post. I've never been good at giving simple or short answers to questions.
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