Understanding Poverty in America: Two Essential Guides

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

(I learned this morning that American journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich has died.  She wrote fourteen books during her lifetime, but the one for which she will be best remembered is the classic exposé  "Nickel and Dimed:  On (Not) Getting by in America.")

For those with a curiosity (or perhaps even a need) to understand the causes and consequences of extreme poverty in America, two books are essential reads.    One is John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" which was published in 1939 and won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel the following year.  Steinbeck's story focused on impoverished people who had lost their homes and farms in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression - and who migrated to California in search of a better life.  But that life eluded them.  In Oklahoma the poor had been tyrannized by the weather and the banks, and in California they quickly came under the domination of the large corporate farms which owned all of the arable farmland and hired the new arrivals at starvation wages.

Steinbeck's tale about the difficulty of escaping the ravages of poverty still resonates today as millions of Americans patch together multiple sub-minimum wage jobs in an effort to make ends meet.  "The Grapes of Wrath," because of its disparaging view of capitalism, has never been popular with some of the wealthier and more influential elements of American society, and it still frequently makes its way onto lists of "banned" books - more than eighty years after it was first published!

The other book that does a superb job of exploring the trap of poverty is "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich.  In that work, which was published in 2001, Ms. Ehrenreich, a professional journalist, threw some clothes into an old car and hit the road in an effort to learn what life was really like for workers on the bottom rungs of America's economic ladder.  As an "undercover" investigator, she took jobs. in different parts of the country as a server in a restaurant, a floor worker at a Walmart, a dietician aid in a nursing home, and a "Merry Maid" franchised housecleaner.  Her observations in those positions, as well as the lifestyle choices she was forced to make in order to survive, were often troubling and sometimes startling.

I came across a quote by Barbara Ehrenreich this morning as I perused a couple of articles related to her passing.  In it she said, "To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone."  And that is the absolute bottom line for both the American and the world economies.  Those who work eighteen hours a day, every day, in the world's sweatshops ultimately drive the economies that feed, clothe, educate, and house the rest of us.  

Ehrenreich's work, like that is Steinbeck, is about class struggle, a topic that makes it an uncomfortable topic of conversation for some members of the more privileged classes.  Her son said that an appropriate memorial to his mother would be for  people "to love one another and fight like hell!"

Both books, "Nickel and Dimed" and "The Grapes of Wrath" should be required reading for students as they prepare themselves to face the real challenges of life in the real world, regardless of what class they were born into - or what level of class or comfort they aspire to.  An end to poverty would benefit us all.