Dear Joe,
I've read "Welcome to Middle Class Lockdown" and I want to say thank you, thank you, for articulating my daily struggle with the vacuousness of life in a wealthy, Republican suburb. I just returned to West Chester, Pennsylvania after a year and a half stint in Madison, Wisconsin. It's been an adjustment, to say the least.
My day consists of listening to the inane chatter of nurses. They discuss the very same things they talked of a year and a half ago when I left -- food, the next trip to Disney World, the latest weight loss scheme, food, Christmas shopping (this talk starts in July), food, weight loss, food, weight loss, food. To top it off, a bunch of them home school their kids.
When I bring up the Iraq war, they tell me to "just get over it." Global warming? Who wants to hear about that? It's just liberal paranoia.
When bad things happen, as they often do on a labor and delivery floor, and things turn around for the better (the baby miraculously survives), as they also often do, they attribute it to God. What about the technology and the skill of the doctors and nurses? Why don't they get the credit? Yet they never attribute the bad things to him. And why throw in the bad things at all, God? Anyway, it's the same old refrain; this is nothing new. Nothing that hasn't already been written.
Nobody's evolving. Those who are emotionally and psychologically damaged have gotten sicker in the year and a half I've been gone. The world's changed greatly. After Katrina, no weapons of mass destruction, NSA spying, the Delay indictments, discovering the elections were frauds ... the list goes on and on. Yet they haven't changed in the least.
I thought that their political views would have changed. That someone would admit to me that I was right. But nobody's noticed that the world's changed. The general public either isn't paying attention or refuses to see what's happening.
I found your site on an atheist (horrors!) website link. I was interested in the essay on the Left Behind series. My liberal friends had no idea that these books were out there and being read by so many people. I, like you, grew up in a Fundamentalist household that believed in the rapture. Scary stuff. Did you see the movie "Thief in the Night?" when you were a kid? I went with my youth group and it scared the shit out of me. I had nightmares for years after that. And I too would think my family had been raptured upon coming home to an empty house.
Anyway, your essays are outstanding. I printed and will copy "Welcome to Middle Class Lockdown" and distribute among friends. (I'd like to leave one in the break room at work, but that's too creepily like leaving a Watchtower at the laundromat.) Maybe something will glimmer through. I think the chances of that happening are as great as something from the Watchtower impacting me.
I've been working at getting out of the middle class. No it's not easy. However, I did manage to ratchet down, by choice, a great many rungs on the socioeconomic ladder. Not long ago, I was in the upper middle class, married to a six figure man. I "had it all" -- the expensive house in the suburbs. I was miserable. I divorced, took very little with me, have no debt, and very little in the way of material possessions. Except for my Mac. And my iPod.
My life is a contradiction, but, like you, I struggle with that. I'm attempting to make it less of one. It's less than it was, but a contradiction nevertheless. Escaping the middle class requires courage and a strong sense of self. And you have to constantly tell yourself that you're not crazy. It's all very lonely. Luckily I found someone who shares my horror of middle class life, so we quietly live amongst them, exchanging sneaky, knowing glances between us. We exalt in Jon Stewart's wit, basking in our sense of superiority, but uneasily aware of our similarities and the fact that we're no better than they are? I just don't know. What goes does it do to be smug? Yet how do you get away from it? I don't want to be like them. To decide that is to think that you're better than they are. What is one to do? You address these very hypocrisies in other essays, thereby making it OK to be hypocritical. What a conundrum exists for thinkers. It's no wonder that people escape through sit-coms.
I envy your writing skills. I can't think of a better way to say what you're saying -- what many of us are thinking. What I wish many of us would be thinking. The thing is, I believe, that we Americans live our lives thinking, how does this affect me? Most people continue to be overtly unaffected. The vocal middle class folks aren't losing sons and daughters in Iraq. They are buying more of what they want, they are continually adding wants -- botox, pedicures, massages, pet sitting, landscapers. If they can't afford it, it doesn't matter, because they have credit cards. If things are affecting them, they are distracted by the whirr of modern life.
I'm going to go back to your website and continue perusing as the rest of my cohorts do their Christmas shopping. Thanks again for your insights.
About Peace and Love,
Becky
West Chester, Pennsylvania
