degringolade

A leaf from 2019

Sometimes it is difficult for me to take younglings too seriously. In my youth, I always landed on the never-never land between the prole and the bourgeois. So obviously I have mixed feelings about what is a right and what is a privilege. Until recently I was concerned about this and spent a bit of time trying to reconcile the contradictions in my worldview (with moderate success).

How this reconciliation came about is to drop the idea that I could have more and replace it with the idea that I could have enough. But that kind of thing is kind of hard to do here in the land ‘o the free because somehow we have decided that a lifestyle that is sold to us in an unceasing barrage by the government and business is the minimum that is acceptable.

Now that I am old and have worked my way past the career/kids/surburbia treadmill and have landed in the genteel poverty of a retired social security pensioner (just so you understand, according to the State of Oregon, I am considered "very low income"), I have the luxury of looking back and realizing that my commie wanna be persona was completely overwhelmed by my civilizational induced need for “more”. But that is the way she goes, and I am not ashamed.

Let's talk for a while about the nature of “poverty” here in America. My favorite statistic is the “homeless crisis”. The best numbers that I can come up with is that 0.23% of the total American populace is homeless. 28% of that 0.23% (0.0644% or ≅216,000) reside in sunny and warm California. Best guess for Wyoming is around 500 and most of them are on the way somewhere else (winter in Wyoming doesn’t mess around).

Now you are probably wondering where I am going with this. What I am saying is that I am thinking that the “war on poverty” just might well be won. Look, just because you don’t have the lifestyle of a 1950’s college educated middle manager does not mean you are poor. What we are experiencing here is an unrealistic inflation of expectations and what we should own. Why I say this is because I lead a damn fine life being very low income.

When less than one percent of the population is “homeless”, well, in my view of things, society is doing well. It seems that helping the homeless is a pretty good gig because staff salaries usually eat up between 40-80% of the money coming in.

I tend to look at the homeless problem not so much as a “those poor people are going to die” but as an enshrinement of guilt by a population that cannot understand why “those people” don’t want to live like a fine, upstanding American bourgeoisie.