This is an interesting question.:compcoff:
I wonder if we’ve already had a two class system for decades. In the 1950’s and sixties, for example, people who could not afford to pay for college…simply didn’t. Slowly, people began to accustom themselves to living beyond their means on every front, buying brand new cars on “time,” using credit cards more and more, accumulating larger personal debt, believing that this was normal. I remember most people buying used cars, and only doctors, lawyers or the very rich vacationing abroad. There was a thing called a “budget,” within which to live.
Truly, if in our middle class neighborhood we had heard of of a family vacationing anywhere outside the U.S., we would have thought they were very odd, unless they had parents still living in the old country. (If they did have parent’s living in the old country, they also would not be calling them long distance every week.) Long distance calls, pricey cars, vacations, expensive colleges, these were not for the middle class, but now are.
If we saw a family going out to eat twice a week,
we would be over at their front door in a nanosecond, asking who was in the hospital or had died.
College coeds going to exotic islands? One car per driver? We had schedules more complicated, more intricately designed than the Normandy invasion to balance:juggle: a brother’s baseball game with a sister’s tap lesson.
Mother’s took turns carpooling, not driving cars the size of urban assault vehicles with 2.2 children watching television in the back seat (lest, Heaven forbid, they experience the boredom of looking quietly out the window for twenty minutes.)
Many people had four or five children and they were not treated as some are called today, “Baccarat Crystal.” We learned to respect time and property and persons, no matter what they drove or where they lived. We heard stories of poverty at the dinner table that would send shivers up our backs and curl hair we didn’t have. We read Dickens and had a notion of what happened to people who couldn’t pay the piper.
There does seem to be another very interesting trend: I have noted no less than five sets of parents who are alums of some upper echelon (not quite Ivy League) colleges, who are not sending their 18 year olds to their own alma mater because of the sheer expense. They are instead jockeying for position at whatever state university will take their teens, often teens who have been driving cars that my father would never dreamed of owning.
kpeople: “The American Way” has lost its way when we prefer objects over a love of learning. The aristocracy of the mind (open to all who aspire to knowledge and is no respecter of persons) has been supplanted by a dress up party, a masquerading as the wealthy or even the nobility.
In the last decade, I’ve seen a vast difference in the expectations of middle class people from my day to the seemingly limitless expectations of today. Then came the stock market crash/real estate bubble debacle of a few years ago and something called fear began to chip away at the ego.
Grandparents are taking in their grown children and young grandchildren due to job losses and real estate bubble fiascos, wondering why “junior” can’t make it on his own. There was a time when many generations lived under one roof and were grateful
to have that roof.
At some point, American’s expectations became simply insupportable, bordering on the ridiculous. I know of a mother who hired a limo for her daughter’s sixteenth birthday. The teen and her friends were squired around town for manicures/ to hair salons and massages before returning home to their parent’s twice mortgaged house in the suburbs.
Only the rich could ever truly afford to live in McMansions, but we didn’t want to live within our means. Only the rich (with the exception of very talented students on scholarships) could really expect to attend an Ivy League college. Somehow, some of us lost respect for living modestly within our means. It is going to take some time to convince people that they’re closer to their hardworking, decent friends living modestly than they are to the upper classes.
Evictions, bankruptcies, and the skyrocketing cost of basic living expenses will eventually awaken us to the fact that the Middle Class has for too long been only masquerading as the truly wealthy.
There was a similar anomaly in another century, when sewing machine patterns became available to the lower classes. At that time, the wealthy were shocked to see “the lower classes” suddenly covered in quite decent clothing that was eerily similar to their own finery. But even as clothes seem to make the man, status is far more complicated than what we wear, and far more disturbing when we begin to mortgage our future with credit and misguided notions of what really matters.
Two classes? This is nothing new. The Middle Class has, for a long time, been only slightly better off than the poor. Except for the wealthiest and the nobility, many are only a few paychecks away from eviction. This may be a prime moment in our history to relearn the art of humility and common sense.
The “Greatest” generation can still teach us life’s lessons.
Most of all, the greatest Teacher Himself is our sublime example of modesty. Judging each person by his or her own priceless soul, rather than worldly possessions, the foundation of His Holy Church was set down to prepare us for Heavenly Paradise, not for sad imitators, not for fleeting moments of consumer frenzy and the poverty of social climbing.
We are lucky to remember we are “in the world” and “not OF it.” God is great! He taught us to humbly ask for our “daily bread.” I know I must remind myself of His humility and try to attain it honestly.
:angel1::grouphug:
Blessings!
Kathryn Ann
