Please folks, can we retire the term "middle class"? There used to be something like a middle class, but it's beyond saving. It's gone.
There's a tiny percentage of folks who live on the invested profits of their capitol assets. They are not middle class. If "work" consists of discussing your portfolio over lunch or calling your financial manager with instructions to buy or sell, you are upper class. You are, to use a highly technical term, f'ing rich. Congratulations, you've made it. Please try not to be a dick and stay out of the way while the rest of us are working.
We are the working class. Join us below the impressionist cheese-doodle.
Most people have to work for their money. If you work for your living, you are working class. Even if you don't work, but your living depends on a family member who punches the clock, you are working class. If you are unemployed, disabled, or just plain poor and depend on some sort of government assistance, your living is provided by the workers who create value, goods, and services. Under the wing of those workers, you too are working class.
Look at your hands, No callouses? No dirt under your fingernails? It doesn't matter if you have an advanced degree. It doesn't matter if you work in an office or studio or sell stuff door to door. It doesn't matter if your job title includes the word "manager". Even if you own a little capital, a farm or a shop, you are still working for it and you are working class.
If you paint pictures, write books, design buildings, bridges and tunnels, it's still work and you are doing it. You are working class. If you are lucky enough to have a job that you love so much, you'd do it for free, you are still working class. Even if it doesn't feel like work, if your labor is a labor of love, it is still work and you are working class.
If you worked a long time and are now retired on the money you saved and invested in a pension plan or IRA, you are still working class. You pay taxes on it. You worked for it, you own it. For all your years of struggle and toil, thank you Grandma, Grandpa, Mrs. Pei and Uncle Ned. I hear the weather in Miami Beach is highly favorable for discussing your gallstones over a game of canasta. Put the next pitcher of whiskey sours on my tab. Even after you retire from working, you are still working class.
If your ego demands that you identify yourself as middle-class because of your education, your ancestry or your bank account, I guess we're just going to disagree. You may be an MD, an attorney or a scientist and consider yourself a "professional" but you still work for a living and get your hands dirty. Maybe you've managed your money well and you can afford a nice boat, a second home or exotic vacation trips. If you pay for these things with money you worked for, you are still working class.
From President Obama on down, when Democrats talk about the economy and income inequality, they never fail to talk about strengthening and preserving the middle class. There may have been some practical political use for this sort of rhetoric thirty years ago. Unfortunately, what we knew as the middle class is all but extinct. Let it go.
Our opponents on the right work very hard and spend a lot of cash on propaganda designed to divide working people by race, religion and class. We don't need to help them with this. I'm not asking you to wear a red star on your hat. I just want you to recognize that your true brothers and sisters are workers.
We working people create value, produce goods, and provide services. Our consumer spending drives the economy and creates jobs. Our taxes support our less fortunate brothers and sisters and fund the necessary services that government provides. We have monumental tasks ahead of us. Despite some recent setbacks, we can build a just, sustainable society. Building word-walls between us is wasted effort.
The working class carries on. What we build, we should own. Cutting through color lines, and national borders, through trailer courts and subdivisions, our aspirations are the same. We are singing the same tune. If you've walked near a pond or marsh at night, you've heard hundreds, perhaps thousands of toads trilling. You approach the sound and the nearest toads go silent, but wider chorus never stops. The song of longing never changes, never truly abates. In the early fall, it fades, but in the earth they sleep. In spring, the song will emerge and swell in the night.
I liken this persistence to Dr. King's statement:
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
The arc bends that way because people keep bending it, hanging their hopes and anguish on it, weighing it down with their struggles and dreams and songs. We are the working class and this is what we work for.
Solidarity.
Feel free to jump the tip jar. Stomp it like a grape.