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Class survival

Forget class warfare. From day one of the Hurricane Katrina saga, the story has been about class survival. "Hurricane Katrina has exposed America's cursed underbelly, its multitudes of poverty-stricken and hopeless, forgotten by a government bent on offering tax breaks to the wealthy," a reporter for the Toronto Star wrote recently.

A paper in Decatur, Ill., wrote yesterday of the disaster, "We were forced to see a population that was barely treading water even before the levees broke. We saw tens of thousands of people who lacked the ability to escape the coming tides. People — almost all black — who live not the American dream, but its nightmare."

And Howard Dean said this week, "The ugly truth (is) that skin colour, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not...the question, 40 and 50 years after Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, is: How could this still be happening in America? We have not swept poverty away in this nation. We have simply swept it under the rug."

The abandonment of the lower classes is nothing new, but the Globe reports that Katrina has served to return the poor of the inner city to the forefront of political discourse. "The searing images of New Orleans -- including the sight of sick and elderly patients literally lying on a conveyer belt at Louis Armstrong airport -- could well mark America's rediscovery of its poor."

Some, like David Brooks in the New York Times, suggest that Katrina's silver lining may be the opportunity it presents for America to take on the cycle of poverty: "Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty."

It seems ironic that just two weeks ago, the federal government announced that over the past year, incomes stagnated and poverty in the U.S. rose to 12.7% of the population, or 1.1 million more people. That means more people now live in poverty in the U.S. (37 million) than live in all of Canada (32 million). And then sadly, Katrina made landfall and further devastated one of America's poorest regions.

Posted by Sebastian / September 12, 2005 /

Let the hate mail begin

Check out my Op-ed in today's Bangor Daily News about the changing face of Maine's Midcoast and the effects the influx of the super-rich are having on the landscape -- both literal and cultural.

Posted by Sebastian / June 11, 2005 /

Changes in Summer Colonies

The New York Times continued their special focus on social class this weekend, with a fantastic piece about the changing face of Nantucket, where the average home price has soared to nearly $1.7 million, and longtime locals have found themselves priced out of the market. Those of us who were raised in or have spent a significant chunk of our lives in a summer colony easily recognize the changes and inevitable tensions these communities face as old money and new money begin to clash. "Shame has somehow gone out the window," one long time summer resident told the Times. "There is no incentive to exercise control."

"At least one new family has built a hedge to avoid people seeing them as they pass by...those open paths had an old-fashioned elegance to them. It is part of an old and fading spirit of community. Blocking them off is an unfriendly and antipublic thing to do."

"Now that the hyper-rich have achieved a critical mass, property values have zoomed so high that the less-well-off are being forced to leave and the island is becoming nature's ultimate gated community."

"It's a castle with a moat around it," said Michael J. Kittredge, who founded Yankee Candle.

Posted by Sebastian / June 6, 2005 /

Class Matters

As economic inequality continues to rise in the United States, the New York Times has a delicious three-part series on class in America (actually, I hated the first piece, but the other two are excellent). The series "is exploring ways that class influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of unbounded opportunity;" it includes fascinating audio slideshows narrated by the subjects of each story.

I found myself enthralled with the series, especially the story of a lawyer in Kentucky who has navigated life through a circuit of class complexities, having grown up poor and shifting later in life -- at least financially -- to the upper class.

Her change in status has left Ms. Justice a little off balance, seeing the world from two vantage points at the same time: the one she grew up in and the one she occupies now.

Far more than people who remain in the social class they are born to, surrounded by others of the same background, Ms. Justice is sensitive to the cultural significance of the cars people drive, the food they serve at parties, where they go on vacation - all the little clues that indicate social status.

"I think class is everything, I really do," she said recently. "When you're poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don't have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It's knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections."

The Wall Street Journal also has been running its own series, and concluded: ''Despite the widespread belief that the US remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe or in Canada has had a better chance at prosperity."

• A Steeper Ladder for the Have-Nots [Boston Globe Op-ed].

• Up From the Holler: Living in Two Worlds, at Home in Neither.

• Life at the Top in America Isn't Just Better, It's Longer, a piece about the socioeconomic factors that contribute to our health and the consequences for three individuals from three different classes as they face similar health crises.

Posted by Sebastian / May 19, 2005 /