Lilith Gets Books And Games

V techs Vsmile Cyber Pocket

The wls coaches radio show on Blogtalk radio

"The New You" Radio Show
with The WLS Coaches, Cher Ewing & Jeff Cadwell ~~~ WEDNESDAYS 8pm ET / 5pm PT

their website here!
I have been listening and participating in this online talk show for a few weeks now, when Lilith naps or plays by herself. I have learned a lot from it and found some of the guests to be very informative. I really recommend it. You can go to the blog talk radio website and listen to the archives to learn a little about it.
the blog talk radio new you show page here!
You can call in or chat live and ask questions of the hosts and the guests. It is a lot of fun. I hope to see there next Wednesday

Lilith goes to Sesame Street Live

Oobi

Lilith loves this show. I admit at first glance, it doesn't look like much but after watching one full episode, I started to warm up to it. It is cute and teaches quite a bit, a lot more than the Teletubbies which I personally can't stand. Lilith never picked anything up from that show (I tried to sit through it with her to give it a chance, honest), but within two days of Oobi, she was singing the "Game, Game" song. She likes it, not as much as Elmo, and I like it, not as much as I like the signing time videos, but it is very cute and speaks to her level. It is on daily on the Noggin cable network.

Signing Time videos

Signing time works!
We bought Signing Times video "First Signs" and even though I have been signing to Lilith since she was 3 months old; I was amazed at how fast she picked up on the new signs presented in the video. Fish, Want, Momma, Dad, shoes, and water. She already knew the rest. I plan on ordering the rest asap. She learned sign from these videos much faster than she has from the Baby Einstein ones.
They are on my Amazon wish list if you want to give Lilith a gift of one.

The Baby's word book by sam Williams

Lilith loves this book. Unfortunately we found it at the library and can't find it anywhere else. This book teaches so much, colors, daily activities, clothing, body parts, emotions, etc. We are going to be looking harder for this book for Christmas!

Lilith watches her baby signs video

Luvsexytrstno1

Savage Inequalities

http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~Daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/1991kozol.html

This is a truly appalling look at the state of public education in our country. What I like most about this book is that you not only get to hear the authors opinions but you get to hear what the children themselves feel and think about their situations. I worry that we are raising a generation without hope or ambition. When you read the interviews with these children (some as young as 6 years old), what shocked me most was the apathy and acceptance even in the very young of their "lot" in life. Some of the brightest children in these schools were only "hoping" to attain mediocre career and educational goals. "Many urban high school students do not study math but "business math"-essentially, a very elemental level of bookkeeping. Job-specific courses such as "cosmetology", which would be viewed as insults by suburban parents, are common and are seen as realistic preparation." "Stopping in the doorway of a room with seven stoves and three refrigerators, I am told by a teacher that this is a class called "Introductory Home Ec." I ask her whether she regards this class as preparation for employment. "Not this class," she says. "The ones who move on to Advanced Home Ec. Are given job instruction." When I ask her what jobs they are trained for, she says: "Fast food places-Burger King, McDonald's."
While visiting a kindergarten class room the author quotes some very disturbing statistics, "Twelve years from now, by the junior year of high school, if the neighborhood statistics hold true for these children, 14 of these 23 boys and girls will have dropped out of school. Fourteen years from now, four of these kids, at most, will go to college. Eighteen years from now, one of those four may graduate from college, but three of the 12 boys in this kindergarten will have already spent time in prison."
At a high school the author is told, "Of 33 children who begin the history classes in the standard track, he says, more than a quarter have dropped out by spring semester. "Maybe 24 are left in June. Mind you, this is in the junior year. We're speaking of the children who survived. Ninth and tenth grades are the more horrendous years for leaving school. I have four girls right now in my senior home room who are pregnant or have just had babies." When I ask them why this happens, I am told, " Well, there's no reason not to have a baby. There's not much for me in public school".
It is hard enough to imagine a child living with no medical care to speak of, most of the children haven't or rarely see a dentist and many have to live with abscesses and rotting teeth. "Although dental problems don't command the instant fears associated with low birth weight, fetal death rate or cholera, they do have the consequence of wearing down the stamina of children and defeating their ambitions. Bleeding gums, impacted teeth and rotting teeth are routine matters for the children I have interviewed. The children get use to feeling constant pain. Children live for months with pain that grown-ups would find unendurable. But, to me, most shocking is to see a child with an abscess that has been inflamed for weeks and that he has simply lived with and accepts as part of the routine of life. Many teachers in urban schools have seen this. It is almost common place."
Most are malnutrition and survive off of school meals that are themselves woefully nutritionally inadequate (ketchup as a vegetable?). Children have already learned in grade school to pocket food for the weekends. Health insurance is unheard of. Many have parents that work 2 and three jobs and/or live on some type of assistance. Many have a parent that is absent (often incarcerated). And an appalling number have been abused. They often get very little support or encouragement from their parents. They live in neighborhoods where prostitution and drug dealing is an everyday occurrence, (and sometimes considered a viable career path). They watch TV and movies where even the family situational comedy where the characters are suppose to be portraying, "middle income America", seems just as much of a fantasy life as the latest time traveling science fiction blockbuster. "They see suburban schools on television and they see them when they travel for athletic competitions. Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too. By fifth or sixth grade, many children demonstrate their loss of faith by staying out of school. The director of a social service agency estimates that 10 percent of the 12 and 13 year old children that he sees are out of school for all but one or two days every two weeks."
How with the odds already stacked so tragically against them can they have any hope of bettering themselves in a school where, textbooks, if they even have them, are 15-20 years old. (the author found history classes being taught with textbooks that still had Richard Nixon as president!) Science labs with no equipment, no computers, vocational labs for "career training" that are out of date and with broken equipment. Schools with 700 students and only 2 working bathrooms (some schools raw sewage frequently backed up from the bathrooms to the school kitchens). "Sewage flowed into the basement, through the floor, then up into the kitchen and the students' bathrooms. The backup, occurred in the food preparation areas. School is resumed the following morning at the high school, but a few days later the overflow recurs. This time the entire system is affected, since the meals distributed to every student in the city are prepared in the two schools that have been flooded." "Before I leave, I enter a boy's bathroom. Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilets stalls, which are eaten away by red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a rotted wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll. "This," says Sister Julia, "is the best school in the district."
Even if these children beat the odds and graduate, "27 percent of high school graduates read at the eighth grade level or below; and a large proportion of these students read at less than sixth grade level. Those very few that who graduate and go to college rarely read well enough to handle college level courses. At most city's community colleges, which receive most of their students from public schools, the noncompletion rate is 97 percent. Of 35,000 students working toward degrees in the community colleges, only 1,000 annually complete the program and receive degrees."
Classroom sizes are often so large that teachers cannot form any type of relationship with the children in their classes much less devote time to children that are falling behind or have special needs. "If you have a high school teacher with five classes each day and between 150 and 175 students, it's going to have a devastating effect. The schools systems, it should also be noted, has been using more than 70 "permanent substitute teachers," who are paid only $10,000. Yearly, as a way of saving money. Average class size in this school is 30. Ideal class size for these kids would be 15 to 20. If we do not give these children a sufficient education to lead healthy and productive lives, we will be their victims later on. We'll pay the price someday-in violence, in economic costs." "One city in New Jersey is so short of space that four elementary schools now occupy abandoned factories. Children at one wood-framed elementary school, which has no cafeteria or indoor space for recreation, eat lunch in a section of the boiler room. A bathroom houses reading classes"
Schools can vary drastically in their condition, equipment, and crowding in one district to the next, "A comparison between an elementary school in Paterson and one in nearby Wayne, the school in Wayne is 33 years old and holds 323 children. The school in Paterson is 60 years old and holds 615 children. The first school has 395 square feet per child, the second 87 square feet. The first school has 40,000 square feet of playing area, the second 3,000 square feet. The kindergarten in the first school holds 15 to 18 children. A room the same size in the second school holds 60 children divided into two groups of 30 each and separated only by a row of file cabinets."
Many of these teachers are being paid much less than in the wealthier districts, "I get $38,000 after nearly 30 years of teaching. If I went across the river to one of the suburbs of St. Louis, I'd be earning $47,000, maybe more. If I taught in the Chicago suburbs, at a wealthy high school, I'd be getting close to $60,000. Money's not an issue for me, since I wouldn't want to leave; but for new, incoming teachers, this much differential is a great deterrent. When you consider than many teachers are afraid to come here in the first place or, if they are not afraid, are nontheless offended by the setting or intimidated by the challenge of the job, there should be a premium and not a punishment for teaching in schools like this." "The salary scale, too low to keep exciting, youthful teachers in the system, leads the city to rely on low paid subs, who represent more than a quarter of the teaching force. "We have teachers," Mrs. Collins says, "who only bother to come in three days a week. One of these teachers comes in usually around nine-thirty. You ask her how she can expect the kids to care about their education if the teacher doesn't even come till nine-thirty. She answers you, "It makes no difference. Kids like these aren't going anywhere."
But even substitute teachers are quite frequently in short supply, "On an average morning 5,700 children in 190 classrooms come to school to find they have no teacher." "We have been in this class a whole semester," says a 15 year old, "and they still can't find us a teacher." "A student in auto mechanics says he'd been in class 16 weeks before he learned to change a tire. His first teacher quit at the beginning of the year. Another teacher slept through most of the semester. "You can talk. Just keep it down." Soon he would be asleep. "Let's be real," the student says. "Most of us ain't going to college...We could have used a class like this." At one high school students often have two or three "study Halls" a day, in part to save the cost of teachers. "Not much studying goes on in study hall," a supervising teacher says. "I let the students play cards...I figure they might get some math skills out of it."
Many of the teachers interviewed (most were almost 60 years old) felt overwhelmed, tired, and defeated. They stated over and over that they felt they weren't getting any support from the districts in which they taught, the city officials, the government, and even from the parents of the children in their classes. Only one example was mentioned out of all of the schools and classes the author visited of a parent coming in to help out in the classroom. Most teachers stated that homework was almost pointless as the parents (even if they did make the effort or have the time to try to help with it), didn't have the reading and math skills themselves to understand it.
This book is very frightening to me as I am about to become a parent myself yet I have known many people of my generation that are "High School Graduates", and can't write a decent cover letter or resume. I know a few people that consider having a high school diploma the same as being "educated". I read some of the blogs and personal websites on the internet and I am shocked at the poor grammar and lack of any type of sentence structure. I wonder if these people don't know any better or if they just don't care. I remember when I went to high school, it only took 16 credits to graduate (my mother's high school required 16 credits to graduate in the 1950's). Drama counted as an English credit, drivers education was a fine art credit, there were no computers in the school for students, (yet myself and quite a few others had them at home), and home ec. Was a REQUIRED course as was typing! It was almost impossible not to have all of your required credits by your junior year yet I know at least 25 kids that dropped out or flunked out of my graduation class, (many of them teenage girls that became pregnant. In spite of this, they wouldn't offer any sex ed. Because they reasoned it would encourage the students to start having sex), it may have been even more. I went to college at 17 but because the district refused to release my high school diploma until my class graduated (over a year later), even though I had obtained all of the required credits, I had to take my GED for college admission. I tested with several drop outs and several adults that had flunked the GED several times before. I remember one girl telling me that she had been told if she flunked it again this time, she would have to wait six months before she was allowed to test again. It was her fourth time trying to pass it. I was very nervous having heard all of this when they handed out the first packet which was the social studies test. I opened my packet and almost laughed at its simplicity. The questions were fifth grade level at the most. The test would ask a question about a historical date or fact one way giving some of the details like the date and who was involved but not what had actually occurred or what the act did then a few questions further down the same historical date or fact would be asked about again this time giving the answer to the first question in its wording and asking about a detail that was mentioned in the previous questions wording. There were MANY examples of this on that test as well as the other tests, including the 2-3 "algebra" questions on the math tests. Every test was multiple choice. Yet most of the people testing that evening had flunked that test SEVERAL times! If my mother hadn't insisted that I read, "The Classics"and purchased workbooks for me from the time I could read, (Which was before I ever attended kindergarten), maybe I too would have been sitting there flunking it that night also. I must admit that I know and still know lots of parents that don't take much if any interest in their children's education. I know several homes that have children that don't even have a dictionary much less a set of encyclopedias. I know too of homes where the family computer is used as a sexual aid and as a toy instead of an educational tool. When I first became pregnant, I went out and bought baby flash cards, books, and educational CD's. I was raised that a certain amount of education SHOULD and is EXPECTED to be done at home. I have had two teachers as friends in my life and both earned much less than I did (even the first friend who I knew when I was working as a CNA). They both worked in poorer districts (one because she was bilingual and the other because he himself lived in the poorer area due to his paltry wages). Both expressed (in different ways but essentially the same message), that some parents treated school as free daycare and some even seemed annoyed when they tried to address concerns about their children to them as if it was the teachers problem and not the parents concern. I have even seen this mentality in parents I have known. I worry what our countries future is going to be like when the children the author mentions become adults and what effect it will have on our crime, homeless, and employment rates.
How much worse does our educational system have to get before the government and the parents take action?
How much further behind do we have to get compared to other "developed" countries before we realize that we are quickly becoming a nation of ignorants?
I hope that others will read this book and take an interest and action even if it is only with their own children.

baby Lists

What follows is copied from a handout we received at our, "Babies, Baths, and Booties" class;
What to buy for the first six months, everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
clothing
sleeper/undershirts (onesies) 6 $10-15 each
blanket sleepers (seasonal) 2 $10
booties 2 $5
sweater/ jacket 1 $20
hat 1 $5
bunting or snowsuit 1 $25
linens
receiving blankets 5 $18
crib sheets 2 $16-20
mattress pad 1-2 $15
waterproof pads 2 $8-15
blankets 1-2 $30
towels, washcloths 2 $16
furniture and equipment
diaper bag 1 $20
crib 1 $150-350
car seat (infant) 1 $50-70
stroller 1 $40-140
changing table 1 $40-100
chest of drawers 1 $50-250
swing 1 $39-89
monitor 1 $40
toiletries
bath/shampoo,travel wipes,
thermometer, baby scissors 1 each $20
humidifier 1 $40
feeding supplies
breast feeding
breast pump 1 $30-300
pads 4 sets $7-15
bottle feeding
bottles and nipples 6-8 $20
formula average 26-30 0z a day $360-450
diapers
cloth (if doing own laundry) 4 dozen $52
disposable 4 dozen $13(honestly it says $13)
diaper services
(pail, liner, velcro wraps, and deodorizers are usually included)
universal diaper service (phone number) $55.90/ a month for 70 diapers a week
rocky mountain diaper service (phone number) $51.20/ a month for 70 diapers a week
totals using the most conservative options
Clothing $140
linens $215
furniture and equipment $429
toiletries $140
equals $1064.00 +
breast feeding $7
or bottle feeding $480
and
cloth diapers $52
or disposable $13 (I am still laughing at this)
or diaper service $51.20 monthly

First let me say that I have to wonder when this list was last updated, and where the writer of it actually got her price estimates from because if they are accurate, I need to find that baby supply store asap because I am overpaying for everything according to even the high estimates on this list. I am especially overpaying for diapers and baby furniture according to this!
examples of what some of these items have actually cost me;
Foleys (during their big baby sale 2/03/06)
bibs (really it should say bib because it only was one) $3.99
blanket sleeper $3.59
baby socks $14.99
body suit $9.00
coveralls $4.99
basic layette $10.72
fashion layette $10.99 (the only difference I can see between them is the 22 cents)
sunsuit $6.99

Target (some off of their clearance rack)
sweater $5.99
jeans $4.99
sleeper $3.98
blanket $1.24
bibs (3) $7.99
onesies $9.99
baby socks $1.00
hoodie $4.98
joy layette $7.48 (yes it is really listed this way on the receipt)
creeper $3.48
pant $3.98
polo $5.99
slippers $1.24
mittens $2.99
cap $4.99

Hot topic (mark down rack)
south park infant sleeper $4.49
family guy infant sleeper $4.49

Babies r us
cotton layette $6.21
satin hanger layette $13.57 (who knew that hanger cost so much more?)
diaper disposal system $19.99
pinehurst teastain crib $434.49 (no delivery, we picked it up)

prairie winds gift shop (aka my hospitals gift shop where I get 25% off)
princess booties $9.75
garden swirl hat $13.50
sun suit $18.00
my family photo album $10.13

"Nickle and Dimed" on not getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

http://www.thinkingpeace.com/Lib/lib095.html

http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/nickelanddimed_excerpt.htm

This is an wonderfully eye opening book that my husband was assigned to write a report on for one of his classes (the report follows). I honestly couldn't put this book down after casually picking it up because I found the title interesting. I have known many people have lived the life that the author describes and honestly much worse. What is interesting is that many of those people seemed complacent in their situations and as if the living situations weren't already bad enough due to the poverty and apathy they lived with due to their lack of education, ambition, or self esteem, they often compounded these with drug use, filthy living conditions, (this and the lack of adult supervision often times lead to encounters with Child Protective Services and resulted in continuing the abuse cycle and lack of educational opportunities that the adults had experienced themselves), encounters with the law, (mostly repeated traffic violations for driving unlicensed, uninsured, unregistered vehicles which most often lead to at least one member of the family having several warrants, no valid drivers license, and numerous unpaid fines in several states), moving when their debts became too overwhelming to face anymore leaving a trail of unpaid utility companies, landlords, and jobs where they often just stopped showing up, (in the computer age this behavior was particularly destructive as most housing will check a persons credit and as most utility companies are connected in some way, this behavior often caused these individuals and families to be forced to move into increasingly worse living conditions and often being unable to have basic utilities (like a home phone), but by far the worst of the self destructive behaviors that I witnessed was the lack of filing taxes once the refund (or god forbid an actual payment was required due to the lack of foresight and any thought of the ensuing consequences; they had changed their W-2 to the maximum dependents possible to get "more" income during the year) became too small to be an incentive. Why was this so destructive, because this eliminated the possibly of qualifying for any type of federal grants or loans that would in many cases enable these people to better their situations with additional education or training that would have given them the wages they needed to not just survive, (if periods of homelessness, living 8 persons in a two bedroom apt, and having to rely on foodbanks almost monthly, is surviving) but to actually be able to live and have the security that the bills and the groceries can be paid and purchased but as many studies have shown, often times individuals will self sabotage themselves (and their families) if they get too far out of their comfort zone and as implausible as it sounds, I have known many individuals that this type of life is their comfort zone. With these individuals it is highly probable that even if their income was more than adequate to support a reasonable lifestyle, they would still maintain their current destructive behaviors making sure that the bills still went unpaid, the jobs didn't last, and that the children would grow up to continue the same cycle. My Grandmother often said, "you only get in life what you settle for", harsh as that blanket statement sounds, I find in many cases it is true although I would modify it to say, "you only get in life what you are comfortable achieving, striving, and working for. You will only go as far as you are willing to break away from your comfort zone and refuse to settle for a life that isn't rewarding or fufilling for you" I know so many people that stay in situations (jobs, relationships, and lifestyles) that are killing their spirit and altering their personalities into such negative mindsets that they truly repel (or are so depressed that they fail to recognize) positive opportunities, people, and situations that could help them rise out of their misery. The one thing that the author doesn't address in this book is the issue of depression and mental illness. Many individuals that I have known would benefit greatly from therapy or antidepressants (which in most areas are available free or at minimal cost). I have found myself thinking in many cases that I know this individual would be appalled if they were mentally healthy and looking at back at their own words and actions. I have heard patients, friends, and family talk about antidepressants and therapy almost waking them up, removing the crippling dark cloud that they have lived with for so long that it had permiated every area of their life without their even realizing it. They tell me that they look back (almost like a drunk or drug addict sobering up one day) and are shocked to realize how jaded and destructive they were behaving and thinking without even realizing it. Unfortunately, I find that the more affluent in our society accept therapy, antidepressants, and in general taking care of ones body and mind as normal and routine as brushing ones teeth in the morning, yet most of the individuals I have know in the lower income groups view it with a stigma or are downright hostile to any sudgestion that they might benefit from a little self help. It as though they continue to neglect their psyche (and often times their body as well) without realizing the impact on their (and those around them) quality of life.
I cannot recommend this book enough not only to the individuals that have and are living it but to those who think poverty is someting third world or that only the unemployed experience. I wondered to my husband the other day what would happen if I in all my pregnant glory stood out on a corner at a major intercection with a sign that said something like, "pregnant, employed full time, can't make ends meet", What would people do? Yet there are so many people in our country that are in my situation and much, much worse, yet they are invisible.

Can we ever really expect to reconcile economic inequity amongst ourselves?

When I pulled the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001, Holt/Owl, New York, NY) out of the stack of school books and left it on the couch in preparation to read it, my wife picked it up and began looking it over, based on our own current financial position. The title sucked her in. As a college student working part-time, married to a pregnant nurse, we are often worried about money lately. She quickly latched on to the story about the author working as a dietary aide and read me significant portions of it, as we’ve both had experience in nursing homes. I had to wrestle the book away from her with promises to let her finish it after this assignment. The truth is we’ve both lived this book ourselves, and maybe I longer than she. This, too, is a long story… let’s just say that, between leaving CU in the Spring of 1990 on academic suspension from the School of Engineering to my return to the College of Arts & Sciences in the Fall of 2003, I held numerous jobs every bit as lousy as the ones the author subjected herself to. However, for me there was rarely any fallback position except to move back into my mom’s house when I occasionally screwed up and went ‘belly up’, and this actually happened more times than I care to recall. During that time I worked at convenience stores, as a pizza delivery driver, a perfume salesman, a cemetery grounds worker, a waiter, a guitar salesman, a janitor in a casino and later a high school, a cabdriver in Fort Lauderdale (during a subsequently aborted relocation attempt), and more that I’ve likely forgotten. The two ‘good’ jobs that I actually list on my resume were a three-years-plus stint as a wet-chemist in a government environmental laboratory (or “contract laboratory technician”, really) and another three years and change as a bank teller. I found myself both drawn in and repulsed at the similarity of her experiences to mine. It reminded me of why I personally possess both liberal and conservative points of view depending largely on the phrasing of the question and the subject at hand. In an attempt to explore my own feelings on the matter, I shall try to look at both sides of the argument, and discover which, if either, of the two sides of this argument I support, in whole or in part.
Two sides? Only two sides? As described above, I’ve lived on the impoverished side, and in a way I still do. In the last six years, though, I’ve invested considerable time, effort, and money (in the forms of therapy and student loan debt, among others) to getting the education that I believe will allow me to enter the upper-middle-class world of degreed professionals that the author refers to ‘returning to’ after her forays into the wilderness of unskilled labor in America. In doing so, and in the events that prepared me for this journey into investing in myself, I am living the highly improbable –if not necessarily impossible- life of the non-traditional student. (As such, I will admit to no small amount of both respect and jealousy towards those who manage to complete a Bachelor’s degree before their twenty-third birthday; I wish I had listened to those who begged me to keep going to school when I was twenty.) This process, and maybe aging as well, has led me to believe that “you get out of life what you put into it”. In my twenties, I refused to work two jobs at once, believing (as the author describes) that “people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty” (220). Having watched my mother work mostly one job at a time through my childhood, I thought it was my ‘birthright’ to be able to live well with only one forty-hour-a-week job. The difference I was neglecting was that my mom had put herself through college and had to work up to a level where she could support the two of us with one job.
Also during my twenties, I knew plenty of people who worked at jobs equally as crappy as mine who seemed to accept this as their lot in life, without the need or aspiration to improve upon this. I think it has a lot to do with expectations. They had grown up with relatively little money at hand and did not expect to ever make very much. At the same time, most of my classmates in the affluent suburban high school I attended grew up around quite a bit of money, but they knew that they had to go to college and work hard if they expected to live as well as their parents. So, I understand the ‘meritocracy theory’ of economic advancement that says, in effect, “Hey, I worked hard for this money, and made it without any help from you, so why should you feel you have any right to share in the fruits of my labor?” Additionally, I’ve known plenty of people who were more interested in doing drugs than studying something that might get them a better job, so why should my tax dollars go to take care of them when they land in the hospital with a failed liver? This trend seems more evident the higher you climb on the income ladder, and I’ll go as far as to declare that plenty of people at this university study subjects, and later embark upon careers, that I would be unwilling to commit to, no matter how much they might pay. Lawyers, doctors, stock brokers, and so many more professions earn considerably more than I may ever make with a Geography degree, but that’s okay with me, as long as I can find a job I enjoy that also allows me to live at a higher standard of living than I do now or have lately. That’s another side effect of growing up poor for most of my thirty-five years: I am now completely convinced that I can be a materialist and not have to “sell-out”, but damn it, I’m also old enough that I need the health insurance to pay for my prescriptions! A nicer bed, house, big-screen plasma HDTV, car, stereo, the occasional opportunity to travel overseas in tourist class, all of these goals deserve no less of my efforts to earn more income for myself and my family.
On the other hand, as one who was raised by a Johnsonian liberal, a real Great Society “true believer”, as it were, I also agree with the author’s final words about how all of the working poor sacrifice their time and energy for us every time they work for less than they really need (221). If I were an Economist, I might refer to this as an ‘opportunity cost’; in essence, it costs the poor (both money and comfort) to accept jobs at lower than the living wage. To paraphrase 1980’s singer-songwriter D. Boon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutemen_(band)), they are ‘victims of our leisure’ --a phrase no doubt borrowed from Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, but it well illustrates the predatory nature of those who try to take more of their share and insist on making a profit from every transaction, whether personal or professional. Herein lies the essential difference between liberal and conservative as we define them today, a definition which has changed in the forty-odd years since the advent of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society: liberals took the Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and turned it into government policy, in the form of social programs designed to help equilibrate a society that was seen to be in the early stages of decay by supporting the poor and helping them to pull themselves up ‘by their bootstraps’.
Conservatives, on the other hand again, led largely by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater) in his 1963 presidential election campaign against LBJ, saw these ideas as both dangerously Communistic and, less publicly, contrary to their ideal of the ‘love thy neighbor’ concept, which was far more isolationistic. That is to say, the latter-day conservative view, having been heavily influenced by the Christian Right, seems to be more along the lines of, “Those who have more are surely blessed by God, and those who have less are therefore, by necessity, less pure in their love of God. Thus, we should not have to share our blessings with those who do not share in our beliefs; let them take care of their own, as we do.” The recent rash of charitable government grants almost exclusively given to religiously-centered charities (see “Faith-Based Initiatives” under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_George_W._Bush for more information) clearly reflects this influence, despite its extreme departure from the original planks of Goldwater’s 1963 campaign. These two sides represent the most polarizing conceptual span in the ideology of Americans today, and perhaps even to some extent the world as a whole.
If we consider this ideological gap as a continuum, with the “bleeding heart liberals” on one side and the “I got mine” conservatives on the other, it is possible to examine every single contentious issue in this country in terms of ‘liberal vs. conservative’ viewpoints, as so often happens. The labor issues experienced personally by the author are no exception, and are furthermore complicated by the modern conditions of globalization, i.e., interdependence of world economies. She promotes her liberal viewpoint to her Wal-Mart co-workers, half-heartedly trying to incite them to organize their own union. One hundred years ago, unions were just beginning to seriously improve wages and working conditions in factories, mines, and other heavy and dangerous industries then expanding across this country, and many men, women, and even children lost their lives in strike-breaking actions perpetrated by the owners of the mines and factories, such as that at Ludlow in southern Colorado in 1914 (http://www.colorado.edu/geography/cartpro/cartography2/spring2005/muhovich/CoalMiningProject/Ludlow.htm). In many critical ways, working conditions in this country are deteriorating to levels that may again incur these kinds of conflicts between labor and management, as predicted by the author herself. The center of the argument lies in the answer to this question: Who has more right to the profits of a firm, the owners of the firm who invested the capital to create the firm, or the laborers that do the work of the firm?
The answer from each side serves the interests of the participants, naturally. The venture capitalists and captains of industry say, “Without our efforts and our wealth to fund the initial venture, this firm could not have existed. Thus labor owes us their gratitude for allowing them to work for us, and they should be happy with whatever we give them, and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market shall determine the wages they receive.” On the other side of the argument, laborers say, “Without our efforts, your factory, mine, steel mill, et al., would stand empty, making no profit for anyone whatsoever. Therefore, you owe us your gratitude and a decent living wage, not to mention reasonable hours, clean, safe working conditions, group health insurance, workmen’s accident compensation, and perhaps even a retirement fund. Is that too much to ask?” Increasingly, businesses have decided that that is too much for labor to ask, but here’s where the argument gets tricky. Management responds, “Labor is expendable; if they think they are unfairly compensated, they are welcome to look for better work elsewhere. We’ll just find someone who’s willing to work for less money, and without benefits.” In the early 1900’s, this often meant bringing in various groups of non-English-speaking immigrants -desperate to leave crowded and impoverished conditions in Europe- as ‘strikebreakers’. Earlier in this semester, we heard about how blacks were lured to Chicago from the South as strikebreakers in the factories, and when the strikes were over, they were often left unemployed. In the twenty-first century, it has become simpler and cheaper to take the factories and, increasingly, the oil rigs and mines to the impoverished nations, and ship the goods back to the markets where the most profit can be made, i.e. Europe and North America. In the process, American unions have seen their numbers decline markedly since their peak in the 1970s, seen largely as obsolete artifacts of a bygone era. The ‘loosening’ of labor laws by conservative administrations of the last twenty years have also cut into the gains made by labor unions in the past.
In comparison to fifty years ago when almost all of the goods available for sale in the U.S. were manufactured here, now very few manufactured goods originate in the U.S. This too leads to higher pressure for lower wages as jobs have been fleeing overseas to Asia, generally, and more specifically to China. Efforts to stem this tide by moving U.S. manufacturing to Mexico (thereby increasing Mexico’s economic well-being, with the hopeful side effect of stemming the tide of illegal immigration into the U.S. from Mexico) with NAFTA have been largely ineffective due to the continued cost-effectiveness of Asian manufacturers. With U.S. wages as much as ten times higher than those available in Mexico, Mexicans and South Americans, both educated and non-, will continue to cross the border illegally, creating yet another ideological break, this time within the ranks of Republicans and conservatives in general. Those on the side of the Industrialists support continued immigration to help keep wages low for unskilled laborer jobs, while those more attuned to their xenophobic and racially-prejudiced constituents worry that continued immigration will lead to a “darkening” or “Latinizing” of the entire nation. Oddly enough, I have always remembered that my fifth-grade social studies textbook (way back in, say, 1981) predicted exactly this effect based solely on continued higher birth rates among the largely Catholic Latin populations of Mexico and South America. No shit.
So what are we, as Americans, supposed to do with this information? The answer will be different for every individual, based largely on where their opinions lie on the ‘liberal vs. conservative’ and even the ‘capitalistic vs. xenophobic’ continuum described above. As Ehrenreich writes, by many statistical standards, the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing for decades (203). This is in many ways a good thing for the affluent; they can continue to pay immigrants appallingly low wages to mow their lawns, fix their cars, raise their children, and so on, with no pesky benefits or taxes to worry about. Xenophobic conservatives have less to gain in this regard; many of them are low- wage-earners themselves, and they find themselves struggling even harder to make ends meet as immigrants increasingly dominate various unskilled and semi-skilled heavy labor occupations. Even Mexican President Vicente Fox famously quipped in May of 2005, "There is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do there in the United States". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicente_Fox)
If your feet fall on the liberal side of the fence, as mine do, you might say that they are already a valuable part of the American melting pot, criticized groundlessly for the same things and in much the same ways that immigrant Irish, Italian, Chinese, and so many others have been mistreated historically in America, not to mention all of those African-Americans whose ancestors were brought here forcibly, and the Native Americans who were here before European colonization of the Americas. They have as much, or as little, right to be here as any of us, so why quibble about it? Most of all, they are already here and already a major portion of the populace, larger than the African American segment. What would you do, build a fifty-foot high wall along the entire border and ship them all back? Unfortunately, this is exactly what some of the xenophobes say needs to be done. Multinational manufacturing concerns show no sign of bringing manufacturing or heavy industry back to this country, so it is unlikely that that will save the nation’s sliding economy. Economists will tell you that it’s not sliding, we are merely experiencing ‘jobless economic expansion’, which is merely a politically-correct way of saying that the rich are indeed getting richer, while the poor are indeed getting poorer.
My personal opinion is that the only way to possibly avoid or benefit from this situation is to try as hard as you can to get into that upper-income group, and for most people the most reliable way of achieving this high level of economic status (although, as with everything else in life, there are no guarantees) is through education. I’ll not even advocate four-year universities for everyone; I’m sure many people would do better pursuing various alternative forms of education beyond high school, such as vocational training, applied professional degree programs, and so on. For me, though, I aspire to the same level of upper-middle-class life that the author returns to with such an enlivened sense of gratitude after her experiences as a working-class poor woman. As I say, I have plenty of experience of life on that side of the tracks, and I definitely hope never to go back. Unfortunately, as unmitigated immigration continues, non-existent social program funding will be increasingly unable to assist those in need, leading to predictably higher crime rates, higher rents and costs of living for the working poor, and an ever widening gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. As current voting trends and prevailing public opinion are uncertain, we can only speculate that more prisons and border walls will be built instead of providing more social aid or direct foreign aid to Mexico to reduce or perhaps reverse the current situation. You might even feel compelled to buy only union-made products and make consumer decisions by learning about which companies support unions and which do not, perhaps leading you to personally boycott Wal-Mart, even if it is a little more expensive to do so. As a consumer, you vote with your dollars every time you make a purchase. Unfortunately, for many of the misinformed, undereducated working poor, buying goods as cheaply as possible at the Wal-Marts of the world is a necessary component of everyday survival strategy, which will probably keep them going in their vicious circle for many years to come.