Why, bemoan progressives, don’t Americans rise up to protest austerity measures? Why do we not openly scoff at the ludicrous and endlessly repeated statement that ‘we all need to suffer’ because of the mess that our financial system is in? Why don’t we proclaim in a unified voice the obvious truth that in this wealthy country of ours no one needs to suffer, that all we must do is skim some of the cream off the wealthy, which will not make them or anyone else suffer in the least? When we ask these questions, it seems that we are forgetting what America is and has been. In this culture there is deep sense of shame associated with being poor, with not being successful, with not ‘making it’.
The American Story, that heartwarming trope that we heard ad nauseam during the Obama campaign, is one of individual success, of someone making it. The flip side of that heartwarming story is the heartbreaking story of the many, many more who worked just as hard and were just as kind and smart and caring and honorable as the one who made it (if not more), but did not make it – because they didn’t have the connections, or the break, or the family support, or the charisma, or the cunning, or the timing or... But The American Story, The American Dream, The American Fantasy is one of a tabula rasa on which each individual is responsible for composing their own fate, a place where one can escape shackles of caste and class and family and Just Do It. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true, that the heady heights of individualism to which our culture has aspired deny at every turn the social and biological realities of interconnection and interdependence. What matters is that we believe it. I know many poor people who work extremely hard and are generous, caring, and clever and who will always be poor. And, because they live in America, along with being poor they will be considered responsible, by the society and, in some tragic way, by themselves, for their own poverty.
I would contend that the most shameful thing a person can be in this country is poor. Kill your wife, lie to the country, steal unabashedly, be a rapist or a pedophile, any wrong can be excused as long as the crime is not poverty. I believe this is a legacy of our Calvinist roots and the notion of predestination: the rich are successful because they are the elect; the poor are poor because they were not chosen; the evidence is in the bank account. No matter what heinous acts the rich and famous may engage in, simply that they are rich and famous shows that God is smiling on them. And not on us.
It is in this way that the United States is, perhaps, exceptional. Here we have been able to maintain, to an astonishing degree and despite much evidence to the contrary, the fantasy that people have what they have because they deserve it; that rich people, even when they flaunt ill-gotten wealth and disgusting habits, are somehow worthy. We have a president who worked on the South Side of Chicago yet never, ever mentions poor people – he can only make it as far down the socioeconomic ladder as the middle class. Below that line, apparently, people don’t even merit being noticed—and they know it.
How can we join together to demand what is ours when we already believe we are getting what we deserve? If the best we can hope for is individual success, how can we pull together to pull all of us up at once? Stories are very important to human beings, and The American Story as it has been told and retold has deep and pervasive effects. The byproduct of shame is paralysis. Shame clouds thinking and precludes action. The Gay Pride movement is called ‘pride’ for a reason: it was necessary to come out of the closet and banish shame around homosexuality in the light of day, which is the only place it can be transformed. It is time for us to pull poverty and hard times out of the closet in a similar way.
Perhaps it is time for a parade. It is definitely time for a new story.