Showing posts with label economic justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic justice. Show all posts

Thursday, March 12, 2020

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

I am a long-time reader of Nicholas Kristof's articles in the New York Times and I have read Half the Sky by Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. I was interested in their newest book Tightrope. A few weeks ago while waiting for a talk at a local library, I picked up Tightrope from the new books shelf and started reading. The next day, I went out to a local bookstore and bought the book.

Yet those kids ended up riding into a cataclysm, as working-class communities disintegrated across America, felled by lost jobs, broken families and despair.~ from Tightrope by Kristof and WuDunn

Tightrope is a deeply personal book; Kristof writes about the kids who were on the bus he took to school, people who were his neighbors and friends, and what became of them. One of out four died from drugs, suicide, alcohol, recklessness, drugs, and obesity. One is homeless and one is in prison for life. And yet Kristof left that bus and became a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Their stories become the vehicle to ask the hard questions about what has happened in America.

What went wrong? What goes right for the kids who end up successful? Who, or what, is to blame? And most importantly, what can we do prevent people from falling off the narrow tightrope?

After breaking my heart, and reading the lofty goals that could change the lives of Americans, I was pleased the Appendix shared "10 Steps You Can Take in the Next Ten Minutes to Make a Difference." Political and social change takes time. But these steps are within our personal control.

We have blamed the poor for their poverty, criminalized addiction, threw troubled kids out of school, allowed health care and sound education to become an option only for the wealthy, watched children grow up with food insecurity, and punished people rather than give them the tools to be contributing members of society.

Americans need to change their minds and their policies. Kristof and WuDunn share success stories of successful local programs that have changed lives and which could be adopted on a larger scale.

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," after all, originally meant "do the impossible."

Some of us were lucky with parents who offered a firm foundation, teachers who took an interest and encouraged us; some of us had opportunities for education, vocational training, or qualified for the military. When a child has none of these advantages--no boots with straps to pull--their chances of success are slim.

Americans need to shrug off the paradigm of blame.

The paramount lesson of our exploration was the need to fix the escalators and create more of them to spread opportunity, restore people's dignity and spark their ingenuity.~from Tightrope by Kristof and WuDunn

from the publisher:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea--deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans--to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. 
With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. Taken together, these accounts provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

Tightrope:Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and SHeryl WuDunn
Published January 14th 2020
Knopf Publishing Group
$27.95 hard cover
ISBN0525655085 (ISBN13: 9780525655084)

Friday, January 25, 2019

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

"Poverty was like a stagnant pool of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go." from Maid by Stephanie Land

I'll be brutally honest, and you can "unfollow" me if you want, I don't care, but ever since Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson created social programs to help the poor there have been politicians determined to slash, limit, and end them. And one of their methods is to vilify the poor as blood-sucking, lazy, ignorant, "self-entitled" criminals who live off the hard earned tax dollars squeezed from hard-working, honest, salt-of-the-earth, red-blooded Americans.

I have known some of "those people," and yes, they sometimes made bad choices, but they also worked to improve their lives. Like my cousin who ran away at sixteen and returned, pregnant, without a high school degree. She was on welfare and food stamps. She also got a GED and learned to drive and found a job...which was eliminated by budget cuts. After floundering for some time, she found work again, and even love. Then died young of a horrible autoimmune disease.

Or the couple who worked abroad to teach English as a second language to pay off their school debts, then returned to America and could not find jobs. The wife returned to school for an advanced degree. She graduated after the economy tanked and still could not find work in her area. They relied on WIC when their child was born. They have lived in poverty their entire marriage, the woman working for ETS and online tutoring.

Stephanie Land had dreams, hoping some day to go to college. Her parents had split up, her mom's husband resentful and her dad broke because of the recession. She was self-supporting when she became pregnant. When she decided to keep her baby her boyfriend became abusive. She was driven to take her daughter and leave him. 

And so began her descent into the world of homelessness, poverty, the red-tape web of government programs. She worked as a maid, even though she suffered from a pinched nerve and back pain and allergies. The pay was miserable, her travel expenses uncovered. She found housing that was inadequate, unsafe, and unhealthy. Black mold kept her daughter perpetually sick with sinus and ear infections.

I know about that. Our infant son was ill most of the year with allergies, sinus infections, ad ear infections. It made him fussy and overactive and every time he was sick it made his development lag. We were lucky. We could address the environmental causes. We found a specialist who treated him throughout his childhood.

Maid is Stephanie Land's story of those years when she struggled to provide for her daughter. She documents how hard it is to obtain assistance and even the knowledge of what aid is available, the everlasting exhaustion of having to work full time, taking her daughter to and from daycare, and raise her child on a razor-thin budget. All while cleaning the large homes of strangers.

And that is the other side of the book, the people who hire help at less than minimum wage, some who show consideration and others who like her invisible. How a maid knows more about her clients than they can imagine. 

Land worked hard. Really hard. She had to. Finally, she was able to go to school and write this book. She crawled out of the mire. What is amazing is that anyone can escape poverty. You earn a few dollars more and you lose benefits. 

Land is an excellent writer. She created scenes that broke my heart, such as when her mother and her new husband come to help Land move. Her mom suggests they go out to lunch, then expects Land to pay for the meal. Land had $10 left until the end of the month. Even knowing this, they accepted it. Then, her mom's husband complained Land acted 'entitled'. I was so angry! I felt heartbroken that Land and her daughter were shown so little charity. 

I think about the Universal Basic Income idea that I have read about. How if Land received $1,000 a month she would have been able to provide her daughter with quality daycare or healthy housing. She would have been able to spend more time on her degree and work fewer weekends. She would have been off government assistance years sooner.

But that's not how the system works. Because we don't trust poor people to do the right thing. We don't trust them to want to have a better life. We don't believe they are willing to work hard--work at all.

Remember The Ghost of Christmas Present who shows Scrooge the children hiding under his robes, Ignorance and
Want? We have the power to end ignorance and want. We choose not to. Instead, we tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even when they are without shoes.

That's my rant. Yes, progressive liberal stuff. But also in the spirit of the Christ who told us that if we have two shirts, give one to the poor. The Christ who said not to judge other's faults and ignore your larger ones--judging being the larger one. The Christ who taught mercy to strangers. 

Perhaps Land's memoir will make people take a second look at mothers on assistance. Under the cinders is a princess striving to blossom. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
by Stephanie Land
Hachette Books
Pub Date 22 Jan 2019 
ISBN 9780316505116
PRICE $27.00 (USD)