Author: jennynazak

The rootlessness of modern industrialized culture is something I see as very much an artifact of the endless-growth economic model. And while giving various benefits to some individuals, it has had a deeply destructive impact on people, communities, cultures, ecosystems, and biosphere.

Here are two books. One of which has become very popular in recent years so you may have read it. The other one may not be as familiar but you may also have read that one.

Two books. One published in 1972; the other in 2001. Very much overlapping themes.

1) A Nation of Strangers, by Vance Packard. Published 1972.

2) Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community, by Robert Putnam. Published 2001.

I found the older book while shopping in my public library’s bookstore the other day to replenish my Little Free Library. Putnam’s book I read a couple years back. Good stuff.

I like how Packard sums up his idea of what an authentic community is:

“My own view is that an authentic community is a social network of people of various kinds, ranks, and ages who encounter each other on the streets, in the stores, at sports parks, at communal gatherings. A good deal of personal interaction occurs. There are elected leaders or spokesman whom almost all the people know at least by reputation. Some may not like their community but all recognize it as a special place with an ongoing character. It has a central core and well-understood limits. Most members base most of their daily activities in or near the community. And most are interested in cooperating to make it a place they can be proud of.”

Packard’s description very much squares with what I have found in my adopted hometown of Daytona Beach, Florida, USA. I have experienced glimpses of it in previous places where I lived, but more of it here than anywhere else before.

Another quote that grabbed me came from a novel I read yesterday, that I had purchased for my LittleFreeLibrary. The novel is Fishing in the Yemen, by Paul Torday. (The Yemeni Sheikh is speaking to the British protagonist, a mild-mannered fisheries scientist):

“‘This house was first built in the year 942 according to your calendar, and in the year 320 according to ours, and my family have lived here ever since, here and in Sana’a. It always interests me when European people come here, that they have no idea how old our civilisation is. Do you not think we have learned how to live and conduct our lives according to God, in that time? That is why some of our people hate the West so much. They wonder what the West has to offer that is so compelling that it must be imposed upon us, replacing our religion of God with the religion of money, replacing our piety and our poverty with consumer goods that we do not need, forcing money upon us that we cannot spend or if we do, cannot repay, loosening the ties that hold together families and tribes, corroding our faith, corroding our morality.'”

Mic drop. If that doesn’t just say it all.

This is something I have tried to point out many times. As a disillusioned environmentalist some years back, I was so relieved to learn in Permaculture class that humans can be a beneficial influence on the environment. Not just a “less-bad” influence.

In prepper / doomer / collapse-aware circles, many people have fallen into thinking that the earth would be better off with humans not on it. You might hear people talking about how billions of people will need to die, etc.

But this is a limited and inaccurate view, based on our experience of Euro / capitalist / colonizer culture. (Or what Daniel Quinn, author of the Ismael books, called “taker” culture.)

Humans are originally living in partnership with nature.

This 15-min TED talk is refreshing & energizing without being “hopium.”

https://youtu.be/eH5zJxQETl4?si=5B7ZgDuf40lkXmbo

Title: “3,000-yr-old solutions to modern problems.” (It’s a worldview we get introduced to in Permaculture class, with a sort of “Survey 101” of examples from many different times and places. But this is direct from the source, indigenous peoples).

TED Talk by Lyla June Johnston, Ph. D., an Indigenous musician, author and community organizer of Diné, Tsétsêhéstâhese, and European lineages. She has many other talks as well.

A lot of wealthy people have 401(k)s. Even some in the middle class have 401(k)s nowadays. So a lot of everyday people are actually benefiting from insane corporate profits.

So a lot of people who identify as middle-class are unknowingly rooting for something that is actually messing up things for the working classes.

The defense industrial complex; big Pharma; the carceral system; big investment companies that are totally commoditizing the housing market … The list of what’s behind those 401(k)s goes on.

As well as for ecosystems and communities. I wish we invested more in Main Street and less in Wall Street.

The Slow Money movement asks the question, what would the world be like if everyone’s investments were within 10 miles of their home? Great question.

With one hand, everyday people are boosting corporations, while with the other hand we are trying to survive the cutthroat world in which the corporations operate.

Oops, I actually wrote this draft months ago or longer. But when I hit publish it posted as if I had just now written it. This is a rough draft of some thing, and I will have more to add later.

Kind of a clunky title, and doesn’t capture the whole gist of what this post is about, but hopefully a title I’ll be able to remember if I ever want to refer to this post.

Some years back, I started to notice that there were two distinct income strata within the category of people who would call themselves “people of modest means.” On the upper end, people earning $50,000-$70,000 a year. On the lower end, people earning $15,000-$25,000 a year.

Even the people at the upper end of this category feel financially stressed a lot of the time. And might not imagine how people at the lower end would be able to survive.

Conversely, people at the lower end might have a hard time understanding how people at the upper end could still feel financially stressed.

Side note: More recently, I noticed two strata within the category of “older people.” No, it has long been recognized that there are the elderly elderly elderly people. But, what I see happening now is that the elderly elderly are still as healthy as the 60 to 70 year old. May be healthier. This may be a downward mobility of health, parallel to the downward mobility of other economic indicators.

Further exploration:

• “The income you need to fall in America’s lower, middle and upper classes — find out where you rank and how these social levels are defined” (Douglas Warren; Yahoo Finance; Feb 3, 2024). https://finance.yahoo.com/news/income-fall-americas-lower-middle-122100515.html

By income (Census Bureau Data):

Lower class: less than or equal to $30,000;
Lower-middle class: $30,001 – $58,020;
Middle class: $58,021 – $94,000
Upper-middle class: $94,001 – $153,000
Upper class: greater than $153,000

By net worth (Census Bureau data):

Lower class: $12,000
Lower-middle class: $61,260
Middle class: $145,200
Upper-middle class: $269,100
Upper class: $805,400

Hey There Fellow Boomers!
BOTH of the following can be true:

1) We worked/work hard at our jobs back in the day.

AND

2) Young people these days have it really tough! Back when we first started our working lives, a lot of the conditions were a heck of a lot more sane & reasonable than they are now.

How many jobs were you hired for pretty much on the spot and you could just start working that day and go home with money in your pocket? Me, a lot!

Back in the day, did they check your credit rating and all kinds of aspects of your personal life? No! And come to think of it, when I look back, I’m not sure anyone ever even checked my driver’s license or cared if I lived anywhere!

Back in the day, did any employer ever ask you to write up an entire marketing plan or entire something for their company as part of the selection process? And maybe they never even got back to you after you submitted the elaborate documents? I don’t know about you, but this never happened to me back in the day.

Or, if job conditions at a certain place seemed like too much, were you ever not able to just walk down the street and immediately get a job somewhere else? I never had a problem! Back then.

Not that we haven’t struggled, and not that we haven’t been through macroeconomic slumps too. But what’s going on now is over the top. Various types of jobs that used to be relatively easy peasy slacker jobs are not anymore!

I’m a hard worker, but a lot of what I’m hearing about these days is absolutely insane and ridiculous, and I wouldn’t want to work either!!! Anytime I have a chance to support a young person in refusing disgusting and ridiculous job conditions, I totally will!

(And the screenshot below is barely the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more, and I’m sure a lot of you older people who are still out in the job world have seen it too. I’m lucky because I’ve been self-employed for 30 years so I’ve been somewhat insulated. I have had numerous side jobs over the years, but none that I couldn’t afford to walk away from.)

Text from screenshot of Facebook post: Calling this generation lazy when we don’t want to sit through 3 interviews for one company, wages haven’t caught up with cost of living, and we are constantly trying new side hustles, is wild.

And on NextDoor yesterday, someone said that people shouldn’t have to work three jobs just to have a roof over their head. Whereupon a fellow Boomer replied that they should up their skills so as to have skills that are worth enough to not need three jobs.

I responded:

But things are a lot different now than they were when you and I were young. I can tell by your statement that you are of a “certain age group,” same as I am.

It used to be easy to afford a small room or apartment even on just one job.

Shoot, I used to be able to afford my own apartment as a college student even just working a summer job! And that summer job helped pay my tuition as well! Same with a lot of other people I knew.

And then out in the working world, it was easy to get a really nice apartment and have a car, buy groceries, have nice clothes etc. just on one job. And I even picked a really low-paying profession, editorial work!

Things are not the same today; the structure of the economy has changed over the decades, and that change has accelerated over the past few years.

Plus, working conditions have gotten a lot more harsh on people. The delivery & warehouse jobs, for example, are crazy. When I hear what people nowadays have to deal with as far as employer expectations, I find it shocking.

Now granted, trade school and community college was and is available and a wonderful option. There are trade schools that people can attend tuition-free and then have a job placement right out of school.

But my point here is that when people are struggling, we older people should see the bigger picture, and offer them encouragement rather than shaming them for things that are a phenomenon of the larger economy.

PS. I say I’m a hard worker and it’s true, but, when it comes to bulls*** requirements and inhumane conditions, I am incredibly lazy and defiant and able to find any work-around to avoid it! And I’m known for loudly encouraging others to do the same. Resist!!!

There is a meme, in various versions, going around saying in a nutshell, “I never had any kind of problem with ‘you people’ until you got up in my face.”

“You people” Meaning anybody not cis, het, white, fundamentalist Christian, etc.

I remember reading a quote somewhere, it was really good and I will post it here if I can find it.

The gist was, if you were always accustomed to being the dominant mainstream, then any appearance of something/someone outside the dominant mainstream is going to seem to be threatening your existence.

Any amount of progress feels like a threat.

This is something best dealt with as emotional processing, not as trying to influence public policy to go backward.

Diversity is a prime organizing principle in nature. And, when we troubleshoot the failures of human systems, monoculture a.k.a. lack of diversity is a very common culprit in all sorts of problems.

On this note, recently on NextDoor someone posted one of those “humorous” dog-whistle posts mocking the idea of asking what someone’s pronouns are. The post ended up getting reported & removed, and quite rightly so.

But someone on the thread asked a legitimate question, which I didn’t know how to answer. And that is, how do you explain this to kids?

I didn’t have a good answer, so I did some searching and found a good answer for them. And for anyone else who wonders how to explain pronouns to kids. Come to think of it, this works for adults too!

(Scary Mommy on how to answer the question, is that a boy or a girl? https://www.scarymommy.com/how-to-answer-question-is-that-boy-or-girl )

Accompanying the text is a little cartoon. Showing little colored geometric shape creatures that are supposed to be a child and two adults. The child (small circle) is asking, “Is that a boy or a girl?”

Answers:

• I don’t know. Does it matter?

• We don’t need to know someone’s gender pronouns until they tell us.

• We can’t tell by the way someone looks and that’s okay.

• Until they tell us otherwise, we can use “they” to talk about them.

The approach shown in this picture works for adults too! Simple and to the point. I am memorizing it and using it from now on!

PS. At first it was a revelation to me that I don’t necessarily have the right to know someone’s gender just because I’m curious. I believe that this wrongheaded notion on my part arose from one of the 15 pillars of supremacy culture, known as “the right to comfort.” As in, I have the right to be soothed and not feel uncertainty or whatever kind of feeling it would bring up in me to not know someone’s gender, be able to classify them in some tidy box etc. I didn’t even realize I still had some of this programming lingering within me. What a relief to drop that!

(Credit: @teachingoutsidethebinary ; and @growingwithmxt )

Yesterday, in this blog and also on my Facebook page, I opened up an exploration regarding why and how some of the less well-to-do segments of US society seem to be voting against their interests, according to the blue Democrats.

I’m pasting here some additional comments that I added to the Facebook threads.

An internet stranger on a Democrat friend’s feed commented that my thoughts about looking deeper and getting curious might be “all good in a world of magical thinking.” And that trying to reason with “those people” is like reasoning with a drunk; that they have imbibed the Kool-Aid for decades etc. etc. And she said good luck with that.

My first response was to feel very offended at what I perceived as condescension coming from this person. But before firing off some sort of snarky reply, I just took a deep breath. And remembered the whole idea of what I was trying to do.

And I wrote:

I don’t need “luck.” I have research skills, and I talk with people. [Note added later: talking with people is actually part of research. It’s often overlooked.] Magical thinking is something I’m definitely not into. I’m into practicality. And, in the past 24 hours, it’s actually become pretty clear to me how it came about that these red voters departed from the Democrat party. It’s not rocket science. All I did was refresh my memory about some of the Democrat policy shifts (which may have been well-intentioned but didn’t turn out the way they were intended), and also look back on the experience of prior generations of my own extended family.

Are things irreparably broken? No! It’s amazing what one can accomplish just by listening. I’m not into crying over spilt milk. Everything is an experiment. Government leaders try different policies, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t.

When people are in fear of losing their livelihoods and being economically insecure, it’s hard for anybody to keep a level head. This goes for anyone of any political ideology. (ADDED LATER: Especially when this fear is based in actual reality, as has been amply documented. Whole towns losing their economic base when a factory shut down in the wake of NAFTA etc.)

On a meta note: Comments from Internet strangers can feel jarring. Because we’re not getting to hear each other’s voices or look at each other as we speak. If anything about this comment I am making in response to your comment feels threatening or unkind or attacking, or lacking in empathy toward you and whatever your circumstances are, please know that is not my intention.

And a bit later I added a further comment:

Adding to this comment. So, the Democrat policy shifts in the 1980s – mainly embracing supply-side economics; and lowering trade barriers — ended up creating economic hardship for people. And the hardship fell on people selectively. One of the best ways I heard it summed up was in one of the articles I linked, where they said a small community could be devastated when the textile factory in its town closed down and hundreds of residents lost their jobs; meanwhile millions of people all over the country enjoyed marginally lower prices on clothing.

So the policy shift created economic hardship and insecurity, and fears of more to come.

So then what do people do when they have economic fear and hardship? Well, experience and history shows that there is a tendency to reach for the seemingly comfortable solution of an authoritarian strongman. Tough on crime, tough on immigration. Xenophobia runs high; immigrants get blamed for everything. And the whole root is a deep-seated insecurity about the very roof over one’s head.

We also cannot underestimate the emotional impact of how betrayed the miners and textile workers and auto workers and all must have felt at this shift in policy, to global competition and trickle-down economics. Neo-liberalism.

This is obviously extremely simplified and generalized, but this is what I see as the pattern that has caused the departure of working-class people from the Democrat party.

That’s the end of the comments that I replied to the individual with.

Here’s another observation that I posted on my own page this morning:

And – I’ve been exploring this issue for a long time, but my burst of reading and exploration over the past 24 hours or so has helped me put together some puzzle pieces that had been puzzling me for a long time.

To wit –

— How it is that the Democrat party can drift so far right, and yet the perceived by the right as being more left than they’ve ever been;

— How it is that many of my Democrat friends are unable to process feedback from a lefty, saying that their party has drifted very far right.

All of this is not about shaming anyone or beating anyone up; it’s about troubleshooting so we (USA) don’t end up continuing to go down the road toward seeking more and more authoritarianism and intolerance.

Oh and here’s yet another aspect, in regard to income inequality and effects of the financialization of the economy:

A lot of wealthy people have 401(k)s. Even some in the middle class have 401(k)s nowadays. So a lot of people are actually benefiting from insane corporate profits.

So a lot of people who identify as middle-class are unknowingly rooting for something that is actually messing up things for the working classes.

With one hand, everyday people are boosting corporations, while with the other hand we are trying to survive the cutthroat world in which the corporations operate.

Further Exploration:

(As time permits, I’m going to copy-paste the magazine article links I shared on my post yesterday. And will include a few excerpts of what I consider the real take-aways.)

— “Workin’ man blues: How the Democrats lost the white working class.” (Deseret News; by Mya Jaradat. Published: April 30, 2023, 8:45 p.m. MDT.) https://www.deseret.com/2023/3/30/23452288/working-class-democrats-politics-socioeconomics/

“Though there were differences between how much centrist Democrats embraced Reaganomics and neoliberalism, by and large, they moved the needle of the party’s economic policies to the right. ‘Once they did that, economically, there is no difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party … Clinton was closer to Reagan than he was to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt.’

“There is still much working-class resentment around the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton signed despite wide opposition from labor unions. …

“The Democratic Party has taken up the mantle of speaking out about racism, but analysts say that this has come at the expense of addressing the issues that many Americans are most concerned about.
“When you see progressives say things like, ‘It’s all about race,’ they effectively deny that something economically significant has also happened. And that’s sort of like saying (to the white working class) ‘The economic pain that you’re feeling isn’t real …

(The article also goes on to point out that the Dems alienated some Black people and immigrants with this narrative as well, as people do not like being portrayed as victims. They prefer the narrative of hope; of the American dream being attainable by all.)

— Why and Where the Working Class Turned Right. A new book documents the lost (and pro-Democratic) world of Pennsylvania steelworkers and how it became Republican.
BY HAROLD MEYERSON JANUARY 8, 2024. https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-08-why-working-class-turned-right/

— Why so many blue-collar workers drifted away from Democratic Party. Christy DeSmith, Harvard Staff Writer; October 26, 2023. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/10/why-so-many-blue-collar-workers-drifted-from-democrats/

— “How Democrats Alienated Their Working-Class Voter Base.” Yaakov Kornreich; August 23, 2023. https://yated.com/how-democrats-alienated-their-working-class-voter-base/

— “Democrats are replacing Republicans as the preferred party of the very wealthy.” (Lee Drutman; vox.com; June 3, 2016.) https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/6/3/11843780/democrats-wealthy-party

— This piece by Laura Carlsen in the opinion pages of the New York Times from 2013 provides a good overview of how NAFTA free trade agreement harmed Mexico and in the end came back to haunt the USA. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/24/what-weve-learned-from-nafta/under-nafta-mexico-suffered-and-the-united-states-felt-its-pain

“Nafta has cut a path of destruction through Mexico. … As heavily subsidized U.S. corn and other staples poured into Mexico, producer prices dropped and small farmers found themselves unable to make a living. Some two million have been forced to leave their farms since Nafta.

“At the same time, consumer food prices rose, notably the cost of the omnipresent tortilla. As a result, 20 million Mexicans live in “food poverty”. … Transnational industrial corridors in rural areas have contaminated rivers and sickened the population and typically, women bear the heaviest impact. … The agreement drastically restructured Mexico’s economy and closed off other development paths by prohibiting protective tariffs, support for strategic sectors and financial controls.

“Nafta’s failure in Mexico has a direct impact on the United States. Although it has declined recently, jobless Mexicans migrated to the United States at an unprecedented rate of half a million a year after Nafta.

“Workers in both countries lose when companies move, when companies threaten to move as leverage in negotiations, and when nations like Mexico lower labor rights and environmental enforcement to attract investment.

“Farmers lose when transnational corporations take over the land they supported their families on for generations. Consumers lose with the imposition of a food production model heavy on chemical use, corporate concentration, genetically modified seed and processed foods. Border communities lose when lower environmental standards for investors affect shared ecosystems.”