Fuck you Barbara Ehrenreich
I’ve been reading Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, and I’m about halfway through it.  I have to say, although I doubt she’ll ever find the time to read my complaints, this book is nauseating.  I can’t believe the ridiculous caricature she paints of poor people as uneducated morons who are victims to the upper class.  I find that poor people are often a lot smarter and more practical than Barbara seems to be.  When I was still  in high school I left home and worked a fast food job to support myself, I had no support except the Sonic crew I worked with every day.  I stayed at that job for five years, not because the Sonic Corporation is so excellent, but because the “poor, lower class people” working there taught me to survive in the real world, and generously supported me in ways that no rich person ever has.  Having since worked many other low wage jobs I feel comfortable saying these kinds of smart, altruistic souls are generally found in the lower class, or at least have spent some time there.  Having Barbara’s experience of being affluent and educated by virtue of birth, as this book inadvertently shows, leaves you completely unable to survive in the real world.  It’s easy to become completely dependent on a system that awards you an unfair advantage over everyone else, assuming that having more somehow makes you better and that a degree from a university makes you smarter, while, in reality, those things amount to bits of paper with no real value.  The “experiment” which seems more like a vacation from what she sees as her “real” life shouldn’t be considered “journalism”.  She starts with over a thousand dollars every time, and spends most of the narrative complaining about her experience.  Barbara is on par with the type of corporate management idiots that disrupt restaurants every so often to stand around and offer impractical solutions to made up problems, except she is more dangerous.  She exploits and insults poor people by trying to speak for them.  The back of the book praises her “courage and empathy” and says the book “brings us face to face with the fate of millions of American workers today”.  What? This garbage brings us face to face with the bias the upper class has when trying to understand and “help” the lower class, assuming that having more money is what is needed to have a better life.  I would argue that the lower class is much less wasteful than the rich, is much more freethinking, has stronger skills, and is often more altruistic and peaceful.  With all the disadvantages that come with being poor, the people who have to fight every day to survive against staggering odds are more akin to heroes in my experience than victims.  At least the poor are aware of their disadvantages and bad decisions.  The rich are often blissfully and willfully ignorant of the fact that the system that makes them seem so strong makes them undeniably weak.  I’m happy to be poor, despite the challenges and the stress, because the alternative is like cheating at cards and assuming that you’re a good player because you always win.  If we would all live simply, the way a lot of poor people do so well, the world could support all of us.  The consequences of the upper class wasting resources and generally being shitty to people are passed on to the lower class and the Third World.  People aren’t starving because poor people aren’t thrifty enough, they’re starving because greedy upper class people assume they have the right to waste all the food they want.  After all, they aren’t the ones who will go hungry.  Making all the poor people rich would just create more waste and problems.  As long as we continue rewarding greed with respect we will not make any progress.  I can’t believe this stupid book is required reading in some colleges, not because it’s “leftist propaganda” as a lot of critics say, but because it is classist bullshit masquerading as investigative journalism.  Poor people don’t need your help.Â
