In the early 1990s, LifeCall ran television spots advertising a device by which the infirm could contact an emergency service without the use of a telephone. The ad showed an elderly woman on the floor, limbs akimbo, pressing her LifeCall device. The hook to the ad, which attained the status of minor camp, was: “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”
Several times this past week, that tag has drifted through my thoughts. Perhaps it’s the holiday season—I record these thoughts on the Thanksgiving weekend, when the stores and streets blossom with Christmas decorations. Here in Front Royal, Virginia, where I am visiting children and grandchildren, I have seen several men sitting on the benches in the bare public park near the town’s center. Their bodies and faces bear the scars of lives hard-lived; they gather the poor warmth of a weak November sun like dark lonely planets, slumped on their benches, hands jammed in their pockets, motionless, dead to the world around them.
The poor and the homeless represented by these men garner much attention this time of year. I am Catholic, and the priests at my parish church in Asheville, along with Pope Francis I, preach continually about the plight of the poor. They exhort the rest of us to reach out and help the impoverished. Both priests and pope criticize capitalism, and while I might agree with their arguments against international corporations profiting from the sweat of the poor, I do wonder whether these gentlemen have any idea how markets and economies work. They seem ignorant of the fact that in the last fifty years markets and trade have lifted hundreds of millions of people worldwide out of poverty, that real, long-term help for the poor comes not from subsidies but instead from teaching them skills and providing jobs that will raise them from their poverty.
But the plight of the poor is not on my mind right now. No—it is the plight of friends and family, and other members of the American middle class, that brought to mind “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.” The poor in America receive assistance in dozens of ways, from food stamps to soup kitchens, from federal and state assistance programs to Catholic Charities. The poor in America, many of them, own automobiles, laptops, and cell phones; they live in subsidized housing; they receive benefits free of charge ranging from health care to school lunches; they pay no taxes.
But what about the people who work for a living? Where is the sympathy from my Church for the men and women who daily knock themselves out working jobs and raising families while getting the back of the hand from the economy and the government?
This past week, for example, I worked on a film project assisted by two young people. Both were both fearful about the future, about losing their jobs. In another instance, an old friend as close as a brother to me realized that he may have another thirty years to live and wept at the thought of facing that much more time of hardship on this earth. Several people I know, young and old, are facing serious health issues this holiday season while others, members of this same forgotten middle class, are cutting back on spending as their taxes, health care costs, and debts continue to gulp down their earnings.
They’ve fallen, and they’re having a damned hard time getting up.
All of us, if we endure long enough, will be sucker-punched by life. Some unexpected, terrible disaster steps out of a dark alleyway, takes a shot or two at our head, and down we go, bidda-boom on the pavement. Sometimes this assailant will give us a few kicks to the ribs or the head; sometimes he rifles our pockets; sometimes he snatches away the people we love most dear.
In terms of money, I have never been rich, but I have been poor and I have been in deep debt, and I’m telling you right now deep debt is worse than being poor. For twenty years, various credit card companies and I were well-acquainted, and that debt affected everything: my various attempts to make money, my marriage, my attitude toward my work, even my health. (For those twenty years, I suffered headaches weekly. In my eleven years of living debt-free, only one headache has visited me.).
Credit-card debt, private debt, monies owed on automobiles or homes: if you don’t have the cash to meet that debt, then it eats at you like the Black Death. That debt can ruin marriages and families, it destroys productivity, it beats you down and kicks you in the head.
The middle-class remains the backbone of our country and our economy. But many who regard themselves as middle-class are suffering, and few politicians or preachers come to their defense. Not so long ago, hippies and others derided middle-class values and finances as uptight, bourgeois, and reactionary. Today, as that same middle-class crashes, too many people simply ignore the wreckage. Meanwhile, the people losing hope, the ones pummeled by the economy, are too busy working to pay much attention to anything else.
To them I would say: kick back whenever you can. Take personal responsibility and try your best to slash your debts. If possible, live more simply. And whenever you can, buck up against all the opposition: the politicians who waste your money, the political candidates who live on Mars in terms of both national and personal debt, and any of the deadbeats who take and take and never give.
Never lose hope. And if you’ve fallen, then haul yourself back onto your feet, shake off the pain, and come out swinging.
.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/middle-class-is-drowning-in-debt-hobbling-the-economy-2014-06-27
The poor and the homeless represented by these men garner much attention this time of year. I am Catholic, and the priests at my parish church in Asheville, along with Pope Francis I, preach continually about the plight of the poor. They exhort the rest of us to reach out and help the impoverished. Both priests and pope criticize capitalism, and while I might agree with their arguments against international corporations profiting from the sweat of the poor, I do wonder whether these gentlemen have any idea how markets and economies work. They seem ignorant of the fact that in the last fifty years markets and trade have lifted hundreds of millions of people worldwide out of poverty, that real, long-term help for the poor comes not from subsidies but instead from teaching them skills and providing jobs that will raise them from their poverty.
But the plight of the poor is not on my mind right now. No—it is the plight of friends and family, and other members of the American middle class, that brought to mind “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.” The poor in America receive assistance in dozens of ways, from food stamps to soup kitchens, from federal and state assistance programs to Catholic Charities. The poor in America, many of them, own automobiles, laptops, and cell phones; they live in subsidized housing; they receive benefits free of charge ranging from health care to school lunches; they pay no taxes.
But what about the people who work for a living? Where is the sympathy from my Church for the men and women who daily knock themselves out working jobs and raising families while getting the back of the hand from the economy and the government?
This past week, for example, I worked on a film project assisted by two young people. Both were both fearful about the future, about losing their jobs. In another instance, an old friend as close as a brother to me realized that he may have another thirty years to live and wept at the thought of facing that much more time of hardship on this earth. Several people I know, young and old, are facing serious health issues this holiday season while others, members of this same forgotten middle class, are cutting back on spending as their taxes, health care costs, and debts continue to gulp down their earnings.
They’ve fallen, and they’re having a damned hard time getting up.
All of us, if we endure long enough, will be sucker-punched by life. Some unexpected, terrible disaster steps out of a dark alleyway, takes a shot or two at our head, and down we go, bidda-boom on the pavement. Sometimes this assailant will give us a few kicks to the ribs or the head; sometimes he rifles our pockets; sometimes he snatches away the people we love most dear.
In terms of money, I have never been rich, but I have been poor and I have been in deep debt, and I’m telling you right now deep debt is worse than being poor. For twenty years, various credit card companies and I were well-acquainted, and that debt affected everything: my various attempts to make money, my marriage, my attitude toward my work, even my health. (For those twenty years, I suffered headaches weekly. In my eleven years of living debt-free, only one headache has visited me.).
Credit-card debt, private debt, monies owed on automobiles or homes: if you don’t have the cash to meet that debt, then it eats at you like the Black Death. That debt can ruin marriages and families, it destroys productivity, it beats you down and kicks you in the head.
The middle-class remains the backbone of our country and our economy. But many who regard themselves as middle-class are suffering, and few politicians or preachers come to their defense. Not so long ago, hippies and others derided middle-class values and finances as uptight, bourgeois, and reactionary. Today, as that same middle-class crashes, too many people simply ignore the wreckage. Meanwhile, the people losing hope, the ones pummeled by the economy, are too busy working to pay much attention to anything else.
To them I would say: kick back whenever you can. Take personal responsibility and try your best to slash your debts. If possible, live more simply. And whenever you can, buck up against all the opposition: the politicians who waste your money, the political candidates who live on Mars in terms of both national and personal debt, and any of the deadbeats who take and take and never give.
Never lose hope. And if you’ve fallen, then haul yourself back onto your feet, shake off the pain, and come out swinging.
.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/middle-class-is-drowning-in-debt-hobbling-the-economy-2014-06-27