Monthly Archives: November 2013

Black Friday

[I am re-blogging my annual rant. Sad to say it seems to be getting worse with stores now opening on Thanksgiving Day and putting decorations up as early as Halloween. 

The headline read “Woman pepper sprays other Black Friday shoppers.” In an effort to have a better chance to get at the cheap electronics Walmart was using as a lure to get shoppers jump-started this holiday season, a woman pepper sprayed about 20 customers who were in her way. Except for the talking heads on Fox News who think this is perfectly acceptable behavior, everyone is in a dither —  but for many of the wrong reasons. Out-of-control shoppers are a worry, but the whole marketing ploy that increasingly encroaches on Thanksgiving and Halloween is the larger problem.

We do live in a commodified culture, as Robert Heilbroner told us many years ago, but our values are clearly out of kilter when money and the things that money can buy become the main focus of an entire nation. If we take a commodified culture preoccupied with possession of things, combine it with an immense advertising machine that works buyers into a frenzy prior to Thanksgiving, it is no wonder that things like this happen. We shouldn’t be surprised; clearly things are out of focus when money becomes the center of one’s life. Citizens who bother to go to the voting booth any more are there to turn around a weak economy. That has been the rule for some time now: vote out the bastards who are taking money out of my pocket. The real issues, like spread of nuclear weapons and the damage we are doing to the environment in our tizzy to raise our already obscenely high standard of living, are largely ignored.

Christmas should, of course, be a time for reflection and thought about others. In this country, and other “developed” countries around the world, it has become a time to get that 30% of the yearly profits that keep the engines of commerce running. It is understandable, since business has become the cornerstone of our culture. But is it necessary to point out that the ideals of business are antithetical to the ideals of the one whose birth we celebrate next month? The fact that a woman in California would pepper-spray her way to the cheap electronics in Walmart is simply a sign of the times and a clear indication that we need to rethink our priorities.

Advertisement

Survival Mentality

“The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping place ever proposed by one man to another.”

William James

It has become a commonplace to remark about the preoccupation with self that defines our current culture. We know all about the “me generation” and have come to learn that Gen-X, in whom we placed so much hope for the future, is even more preoccupied with themselves than their parents. Christopher Lasch, whom I have referenced in previous blogs, is one of the few thinkers to attempt to understand why this has come about. And he is one of the best minds I have encountered to think with about our cultural condition. He likens our present outlook on our world to that of a POW, especially the inmates of Auschwitz, during the Second World War. As Lasch notes regarding our current malaise, in his remarkable book The Minimal Self:

“People have lost confidence in the future. Faced with an escalating arms race, an increase in crime and terrorism, environmental deterioration, and the prospect of long-term economic decline, they have begun to prepare for the worst, sometimes by building fallout shelters and laying in provisions, more commonly by executing a kind of emotional retreat from the long-term commitments that presuppose a stable, secure, and orderly world. . . . Everyday life has begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity. Selective apathy, emotional disengagement from others, renunciation of the past and the future, a determination to live only one day at a time — these techniques of emotional self-management, necessarily carried to extremes under extreme conditions, in a  more moderate form have come to shape the lives of ordinary people under the ordinary conditions of a bureaucratic society widely perceived as a far-flung system of total control.”

According to Lasch, this has given rise to a siege mentality as we embrace a survival ethic — not unlike those in the camps such as Auschwitz who struggled to remain human while they gradually retreated within themselves.

“In fact, the siege mentality is much stronger in those who know Auschwitz only at second-hand than in those who lived through it. It is the survivors [of Auschwitz] who see their experience as a struggle not to survive but to stay human. While they record any number of strategies for deadening the emotional impact of imprisonment — the separation of the observing self from the participating self; the decision to forget the past and live exclusively in the present; the severance of emotional ties to loved ones outside the camps; the cultivation of a certain indifference to appeals from fellow-victims — they also insist that emotional withdrawal could not be carried to the point of complete callousness without damaging the prisoner’s moral integrity and even his will to live. [In contrast, we exhibit]  a diminished capacity to imagine a moral order transcending [our own experience], which alone can give meaning [to our lives].”

This is heavy stuff, indeed. As the quote from William James at the top of this page suggests, mere survival for its own sake is hardly a lofty human ideal. What truly matters is what survives — what sort of person or culture. It’s about character and moral fiber, not about breathing in and out for as long as possible. We don’t talk much about character any more, and at present it is certainly the case that the moral high ground seems to have flattened after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr leaving the landscape rather barren, which is something to be deeply regretted. And there are many signs around us that point to our ignorance of the past and loss of hope in the future in our preoccupation with our own present experience. As the ads tell us, “Do It Now!”  This attests to the very malaise Lasch describes; his analysis seems to me to be quite plausible.

But he does not despair. He does not see the various movements to save the planet, stop the nuclear arms race, show concern about our shared world, together with the “growing criticism of consumerism and high technology, criticism of the ‘masculine’ psychology of conquest and competition” as complete answers, but they do “hold out the best hope for the future.” Though Lasch would not have us abandon hope for radical changes in the political landscape, at present politics does not seem to provide a way out, given the stranglehold those “profoundly undemocratic” corporations have on the political process. None the less, there are things each one of us can do within the limits of our own capacities to mitigate corporate greed and the destruction of the planet, while we seek to restore the moral high ground, reaching out to others and turning our attention toward a world filled with beauty and finding joy in the things and people that surround us — and certainly not abandoning hope in the future altogether. This would allow us to avoid the “survival mentality” of which Lasch speaks and which threatens to suffocate the human spirit.

Science and Truth

There are still those among us who deny that scientific truth has any sort of hold on free minds. We can believe anything we want and call “true” anything we find comfortable they maintain. But while we can certainly believe anything we want to — there are those among us who think the earth is flat, after all — we are really not in a position to reject as mere “opinion” scientific truths that have the weight of evidence and, more importantly, predictive power, on their side.

If this hasn’t been clear for some time, the recent spate of tornadoes in the South of this continent, together with the devastating category 5 typhoon that recently hit the Philippines should shut the mouths and open the minds of the naysayers, since meteorologists predicted both of these terrible events quite accurately and in a timely fashion. It should but almost certainly will not. While meteorology is not an exact science, given the huge numbers of variables that make prediction difficult, recent technologies together with the satellites that clutter our skies make weather prediction remarkable accurate. And it is predictive power, more than anything else, that makes scientific truth undeniable. Given our uncertainties about the future, any body of knowledge or method of investigation that makes prediction more and more accurate demands our assent. We can continue to say we don’t believe in evolution or the “big bang” theory, but when the scientist brings to the table his charts and graphs and — more importantly — his predictions that continue to ring true, we really must abandon superstitious nonsense and embrace truth, even if it is terribly uncomfortable.

Plato was the first thinker in the West to organize his thoughts into systematic wholes, worry about inconsistencies and contradictions and seek coherent truth. Thus began the transition from religion to philosophy in the West. Aristotle married this concern with an empirical turn of mind and invented what we now call “science.” Even though so much of what Aristotle thought was certain has been proven false — such as the Ptolemaic notion that the earth is stationery and the sun and planets revolve around it — his falsehoods were rooted out by an improved empirical method forged in the minds and laboratories of such people as Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo and Newton. Scientific truth is simply not to be denied and science itself, while certainly not all-embracing (it ignores deep and hidden truths of the human heart that are not open to measurement and quantification) is the best humans have come up with so far.

Thus, the ignoramuses, in Congress especially, who deny global warming are not only flying in the face of reason and science and ignoring salient truths, they are putting human lives at risk by denying the scientific certainties that the planet is warming and will soon become uninhabitable for human and animal life. All in the name of power and profits. One can understand the craving for more and more money — humans by and large seem to be a greedy and stupid lot — but one must also realize that there is a time when certain truths can no longer be denied and time has arrived to begin to try to reverse a process that we humans have helped to bring to the kindling point.

Psychology and Literature

I have often thought (and have been known to remark in public) that there is more insight into the human psyche in a good novel than there is in many a psychology text-book. I would modify that somewhat and now remark that there is considerable psychological insight even in the short stories of consummate writers such as Anton Chekhov.

Indeed, in “A Calamity” written by this medical man only about eight years after he started publishing his short stories, Chekhov presents us with a wonderfully understated  study of a young woman who finds herself suddenly at war with herself. His heroine, Sofya Petrovna, is a happily married woman with a husband she loves and a daughter she adores. But she is pursued by a suitor, Ivan Mihailovich, who worships the ground she walk on. Despite her conscious repulsion from the fact that she finds the man’s advances flattering and even desirable, she finds herself drawn toward Ivan and unable to shake herself loose from her fascination with him and his love for her. She attempts to push him away, with little effort and no effect whatever, and begins to look at her husband and even her daughter differently. The husband she has loved now appears dull and insipid. “My God,” she thinks to herself, “I love and respect him, but. . . . why does he chew his food so disgustingly?” Later as she examines him napping after dinner, she notices “his feet, very small, almost feminine, in striped socks; there was a thread sticking up at the tip of each sock.” Even her daughter puts her off; as she picks her up she finds her “heavy and irresponsive.” Clearly, her perspective has altered and as she admonishes herself, calling herself “shameless thing,” and “vile creature,” she leaves her husband and “choking with shame” finds herself “pushed forward” by something “stronger than shame, reason, or fear” away from her husband and daughter and toward a clandestine meeting with Ivan.

There are a number of things that strike the reader about this remarkable story. For all its brevity, it is beautifully written and a subtle study of the battle that is going on inside this young woman as she struggles with her sense of propriety and respectability coupled with her mindless conviction that her respectable marriage is really all she could possibly want — and the compulsion to go to the man who loves her deeply and provides her with the excitement and deep feelings she has never previously allowed herself to feel. We have one of the early suggestions, before Freud, that there are unconscious urges that fight against reason and habit and which compel us in directions we would really rather not take.

David Hume once said that reason is the slave of the passions and Chekhov seems to be presenting us with a test case that demonstrates this profound truth. We might want to think that we can be directed by reason and what we think is the right thing to do — and we may even spend our lives trying to follow that path. But at times there are urges beneath the conscious level that draw us in directions we find repugnant. The struggle was studied in depth by Immanuel Kant who insisted that the right thing is always to follow one’s sense of duty, as dictated by reason, and fight against inclination. But as Chekhov suggests it is sometimes not quite that simple. Fight as we might, the inclinations are often stronger and do not allow reason to rule. Sometimes we do what we really (unconsciously) want to do rather than what we ought to do, despite the fact that we know it is wrong.

Long ago Socrates was convinced that if we knew what was the right thing to do, we would do it. But he had no clear notion of what we now call “will” and he doesn’t seem to have been fully aware of the battle that goes on inside us when we fight against inclinations that we might regard as “vile” and “shameless.” Aristotle faulted Socrates for his simplistic take on this issue. But I don’t think either Aristotle or Kant gave the struggle full measure. Chekhov did, and in this very short story, a mere fifteen pages long,  he makes it clear that at times we simply cannot muster the “willpower” to do the right thing, much as we might think we want to.

Good Fortune

In reading a collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov I have noticed a number of recurring themes. I have commented in a previous blog on one of them: the conviction on Chekhov’s part that in great measure a person’s good fortune is simply a matter of luck. Another theme that recurs is the conviction that one person’s good fortune is only possible as a result of the hard work, suffering, and even death of others less fortunate. This is a thought that may or may not be true, but it is almost certainly one that never crosses the minds of very wealthy folks, like the Koch brothers, for example, who have earned their millions by sending the less fortunate to work in their coal mines and oil fields to sweat and strain so the brothers can use their millions to live the high life and attempt to buy a government. Nor does it occur, I dare say, to John Schnatter the founder of Papa John’s pizza chain whose employees work for minimum wage and are cajoled into voting for the candidate of the owner’s choice at election time. And one must wonder how much time the descendants of Sam Walton have spent worrying about the thousands of exploited workers who sweat and toil so the Walton heirs can sleep on silk sheets and eat at the best restaurants. In any event, it does seem to me to be a thought worth considering and I have selected a couple of passages from two short stories by Chekhov to convey the rather persuasive way he presents his case.

In the first case, “Gooseberries,” the narrator has this reflection:

“obviously the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would not be possible. It’s a general hypnosis. At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as the wind stirs an aspen — and everything is fine.”

We hear the echoes of the notion that good fortune and happiness are a matter of luck, and as Chekhov says in another place, quoting Pushkin, “Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.” Indeed. But the notion that happiness for one person rides on the backs of misery for countless others is repeated in another of Chekhov’s stories, “On Official Business,” where the narrator, a coroner investigating the apparent suicide of an impoverished man, after a sleepless night in which he was haunted by dreams, reflects as follows:

“What [the men in his dream] sang had occurred to him before, but this thought had somehow sat behind other thoughts in his head and flashed timidly, like a distant lantern in misty weather. And he felt that this suicide and the peasant’s grievances lay in his conscience too; to be reconciled with the fact that these people, submissive to their lot, heaped on themselves what was heaviest and darkest in life — how terrible it was! To be reconciled with that, and to wish for oneself a bright, boisterous life among happy, contented people, and to dream constantly of such a life, meant to dream of new suicides by overworked, careworn people, or by weak neglected people, whom one sometimes talked about with vexation or mockery over dinner, but whom one did not go to help.”

At the end of the second of Chekhov’s stories above, the beadle,  a poor man, dressed in tatters,  who works hard to keep body and soul together, struggles on foot through the deep snows left by a blizzard that fell overnight and has kept the coroner and his doctor friend trapped at a friend’s house a mile out of town; he hopes to find them and assist them on their way back into town. He remarks with a mixture of relief and concern that “Folks are very worried, the kids are crying . . . .We thought you’d gone back to [Moscow], Your Honor. For God’s sake, take pity on us, dear benefactors. . . ”  But, as Chekhov says with stinging irony, “The doctor and the coroner said nothing, got into the sleigh, and drove to Syrnya.” The beadle, of course, will walk back to town through the deep snow. No thanks, no tip. He doesn’t really expect any. After a night of soul-searching on the coroner’s part, it’s back to business as usual.

Indeed it is a truth that should challenge our cherished illusions that those who are careworn and suffer in this culture are dismissed “over dinner” by the contented fat-cats as lazy and shiftless. And yet it is precisely those people, struggling to keep their heads above the poverty level, who make the easy life possible for the fat-cats.

Confession

My name is Hugh and I am a football junkie fan. I am fully aware that there is an overwhelming stench of corruption at the collegiate level and an alarming number of the players at both the pro and college levels are borderline felons — some of them over the borderline. I also know many of them almost certainly take illegal drugs to enhance their performance. And I am aware, thanks to recent allegations, that the “culture” in the locker room in at least one professional football team resembles a jungle. Still, I love to watch the game and see athletes perform at the highest levels. Mea culpa.

But let’s ponder the recent allegations about one of the borderline criminals who appears to be guilty of intimidation, harassment and bullying — words that are far too mild to describe the sorts of things that Richie Incognito has tweeted to the young Jonathan Martin who has left the Miami Dolphins football team under duress and now attempts to recover his mental balance. One of the texts, according to ESPN, is as follows:

“Hey, wassup, you half n—– piece of s—. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. [I want to] s— in your f—ing mouth. [I’m going to] slap your f—ing mouth. [I’m going to] slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. F— you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.”

Reporters who have followed this story are astonished to discover that the players in the locker room (where, as stated above the culture resembles a jungle) support Richie Incognito, who has been dismissed  from the team pending an investigation by officials of the NFL. Those same players — a majority we are told — fault Martin for being less than a man by quitting the team and blowing the whistle on his teammate. I kid you not. On the face of it we have a straightforward case of bullying and intimidation in the extreme, possibly including physical attacks against Miller — to the point where the victim suffered mental anguish. But apologists for Incognito explain that this is the way it is in pro football: older, more experienced players have to “toughen up” the younger players and make them angry enough to go out each Sunday and lay themselves on the line for the team. It’s been said that some coaches have urged the experienced players to work on some of the younger players to make them “mean dogs” rather than”house dogs,” despite the fact that psychological evidence strongly suggests that behavior such as Incognito’s is counter-productive.

In a word, we are faced with one of two uncomfortable truths: either Richie Incognito is a criminal and racist bully who deserve the severest penalties possible under the law, or this is the norm and the football players who play for the NFL are indeed more nearly animals than humans, which says something about those of us who glory in the spectacle of men warring against one another until one or both are carried off on a stretcher — after which we accord them a moment’s silence. But the game must go on, or, at any rate it assuredly will.

So, given these alternatives, why on earth would any self-respecting person admit that he or she is delighted to watch this spectacle? I suppose the answer is partly given above: the athletes who perform do so at the highest levels and it is exciting to watch. But I think it goes beyond that. I think those of us who watch football with great interest find it a release of pent-up emotions and the frustrations that accompany living in a society where so much seems to be wrong and change is out of reach– together with a ready substitute to fill the vacuum created by the absence of aesthetic or religious experience. It is certainly the case that the football stadiums are filled to the brim each week while the churches, art galleries, and concert halls are nearly empty. Further, there isn’t much the individual can do to effect change with the corporations and their millions of dollars in control of the political machine. And given the amount of money the entertainment industry can make from presenting the spectacle every week — in college or professional form 24/7 from August until mid-January — it is likely to become even more a part of the culture in years to come as we make excuses for the players’ behavior on and off the field on the grounds that this is simply the way it is.

I admit that my love of the game weakens as my awareness of the price we all pay increases. Soon, perhaps, I will wean myself completely from this brutal game where the cost to the players and the spectators as well may already have passed acceptable levels. In the meantime I ask you to excuse me while I check the schedule.

Best For America?

I received an email that was sent to her friends list by a good friend of mine who is very concerned about what she insists on calling “Obamacare.” She had a list of questions about the Affordable Care Act (ACT) ending with the question: “Is all this going to work out and be the best for America??????”  I dare to say her concerns reflect those of a great many other Americans an alarming number of whom seem to have pushed the panic button and are convinced we are on the verge of Armageddon.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on the Affordable Care Act. By no means. But I can read and I have checked a number of items. In spite of the glitches that have shown up in the early days — inevitable some would say — there are a number of questions that have yet to be answered. But, on balance, it would seem that the Act is a good idea though it has a great many rough edges yet to be ironed out. We must remember that this country is one of the very few “developed” nations with inadequate health care. Indeed, according to a recent story on PBS, health care costs in the United States are the highest, per person, in the world. And, despite the fact that for those who can afford it the care is outstanding, it is not clear that as a nation we are getting the most for our money. As the story relates, in this country

  • There are fewer physicians per person than in most other OECD countries. In 2010, for instance, the U.S. had 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 people — well below below the OECD average of 3.1.
  • The number of hospital beds in the U.S. was 2.6 per 1,000 population in 2009, lower than the OECD average of 3.4 beds.
  • Life expectancy at birth increased by almost nine years between 1960 and 2010, but that’s less than the increase of over 15 years in Japan and over 11 years on average in OECD countries. The average American now lives 78.7 years in 2010, more than one year below the average of 79.8 years.

The ACT is designed to lower costs and extend health care to most, if not all, of those who could not otherwise afford it. This, it seems to me, is a lofty idea and the overriding principle that should always be kept in mind when weighing costs and benefits. In the end, what matters is what kind of country we want to live in: one that worries more about the businesses that might suffer because of the enforced costs of extending health care to employees or one that cares about its citizens and their health regardless of the monetary costs.

We know, for example, that a great many young people who would otherwise have no health insurance can now be included in their parents’ insurance — until they are 26 years of age. My understanding is that thousands of young people are now covered who were not covered previously. And given the growing number of young people who are unable to find employment, this is an unmitigated blessing. Further, Medicade coverage is extended under this plan, thereby allowing a great many of the poor and elderly to receive care that they were not able to receive previously. In fact, the number of uninsured under this plan will be reduced by 32 million, a fact that cannot be ignored.

The number of states that have opted out of their commitment to the ACT has reduced estimates of the eventual financial benefits to the nation from $200 billion to $84 billion. Still, every little bit helps when it comes to the budget deficit. Despite the benefits in the form of a reduction to the national debt, however, there will be costs to small businesses — which concern my friend — and these must be factored in, since the Act requires that businesses employing more than 50 people must provide them with health care. This has resulted in all sorts of shenanigans by companies — cutting the hours of their employees to reduce the number of full-time employees, refusing to employ more than 49 full-time people, and the like.  The fact that small businesses that operate on a low profit margin will be required to assist their employees in paying for their health care will, in fact, place a burden on those businesses and in the end force some of them to close down, and it does appear to be the weakest link in the Affordable Care Act.  But, given the fact that an estimated 200,000 small businesses closed down during the recent recession, it must be admitted that small businesses are a risk and always have been and one suspects that with careful planning and intelligent cost-cutting fewer will go under as a direct result of the ACT than have been predicted by the knee-jerkers among us. In any event, one must wonder why a federal mandate is required to insist that employers take care of their employees’ health needs, which many regard as one of our basic human rights. In any event, the plan has generated more heat than light among the fearful due to its complexities.

And there’s the rub. My friend’s email stems from her fear that this plan will bring America to its collective knees. She starts with FDR’s famous quote that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” which is a good thing to keep in mind. Any plan this encompassing that involves inevitable glitches and also involves controversial elements such as mandatory contraception will raise the hackles of the nervous element among us — and that element is growing as those who have political axes to grind have learned how easy it is to control the population through fear — of terrorists, or increased taxation, or sex education in the schools. But as I said above, it comes down to what sort of country we want to call our own: one that cares about the health of its citizens or one that cares more about “the bottom line.”

Poverty and Prison

One of the most insidious falsehoods out there is that the wealthy have earned their wealth and the poor deserve their poverty. The poor, it is commonly said (by the rich), are lazy and unmotivated: if they really wanted to they could apply themselves and be off the dole. This sort of reasoning is known as “rationalization” and is frequently used to attempt to justify the reduction in social programs that help those most in need — as though “need” is something people bring on themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth as a brief passage in Anton Chekhov’s brilliant short story “Ward No.6” tells us. In that story the young Ivan Dmitrich has just seen a couple of prisoners pass on the streets in irons accompanied by soldiers taking them back to their prison cells. He reflects as follows:

“Not for nothing has age-old popular experience taught us that against poverty and prison there is no guarantee. And a judicial error, given present-day court procedures, was very possible, and it would be no wonder if it happened. Those who take an official business-like attitude toward other people’s suffering, like judges, policemen, doctors, from force of habit, as time goes by, become callous to such a degree that they would be unable to treat their clients otherwise than formally even if they wanted to; in this respect they are no different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in his backyard without noticing the blood. With this formal, heartless attitude toward the person, a judge needs only one thing to deprive an innocent man of all his property rights and sentence him to hard labor: time. Only the time to observe certain formalities, for which the judge is paid a salary, and after that — it is all over. Then go looking for justice and protection . . .  And is it not ridiculous to think of justice when society greets all violence as a reasonable and expedient necessity, and any act of mercy — an acquittal, for instance — provokes a great outburst of dissatisfied, vengeful feeling?”

These truths are coming home to growing numbers of people in this country in this economy as a recent study has shown — focusing on the plight of a great many young people who will doubtless soon either be in prison or regarded as ne’er-do-wells by those who are comfortably off:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Almost 6 million young people are neither in school nor working, according to a study released Monday.

That’s almost 15 percent of those aged 16 to 24 who have neither desk nor job, according to The Opportunity Nation coalition, which wrote the report.

Other studies have shown that idle young adults are missing out on a window to build skills they will need later in life or use the knowledge they acquired in college. Without those experiences, they are less likely to command higher salaries and more likely to be an economic drain on their communities.

“This is not a group that we can write off. They just need a chance,” said Mark Edwards, executive director of the coalition of businesses, advocacy groups, policy experts and nonprofit organizations dedicated to increasing economic mobility. “The tendency is to see them as lost souls and see them as unsavable. They are not.”

But changing the dynamic is not going to be easy.

The coalition also finds that 49 states have seen an increase in the number of families living in poverty and 45 states have seen household median incomes fall in the last year. The dour report underscores the challenges young adults face now and foretell challenges they are likely to face as they get older.

There is nothing quite so ugly as righteous indignation. When we think of those who are down and out it might be well if we were a bit less smug about their condition and recall that there but for the grace of God might go any one of us. As the middle class disappears into the impoverished class the notion that those people deserve their fate because of a failure on their part is absurd; we might think along with Ivan here that so much of what happens to each one of us is a matter of pure chance and the question of whether we deserve our wealth or our poverty is moot at best. Sometimes shit just happens, as growing numbers of people are learning every day.