The “Shame” Culture Of Poverty- Down In The Base Of Society Life Ain’t Pretty

 

By Josh Breslin

 

 

Recently in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, “Angela’s Ashes”, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different the story he tells of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb a generation later. The commonality? I would argue that down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpen proletariat the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange photograph can find that place.

 

I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came of age in that Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the “dole” and getting a low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age. Hell, not even a gold watch for meritorious service for God’s sake. That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. Escaping that fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of the capitalist system down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.

 

In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, “Tales From The ‘Hood,” on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In “Angela’s Ashes” he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, “A Coming Of Age Story”, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants for a square dance demonstration in order to ‘impress’ a girl that I was smitten with in elementary school. I caught holy hell for that (and missed my big chance with the youthful “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).

 

I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences in that series that I did a couple of years ago at the request of one of my high school classmates, that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in”. One of the ways to be “in”, at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ’68,” and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool”, you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” is….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool was to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother. Or to wear oddly colored or designed clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys”. I remember the routine-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store of the day.

 

All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right’ added up. All of this created a ‘world’ where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed), where the closeness of neighbors is suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” is more like something out of “the night of the long knives”. If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Leviathan", in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.

 

Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying in the 21st century we need more social solidarity not less more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary titled, “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?,” one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the social solidarity of the future. In that future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.