Another Bush Gift: The Death of the Middle Class

For me, being Middle Class was an aspiration; not a means to an end



If you are not worried now, you can’t be part of the Middle Class…

I love the Middle Class.

I was raised in Harlem but I lived around the rich.

We were not rich ourselves.

I don’t know what we were. Probably poor but we wouldn’t admit to it.

I was a Depression kid and many of us in the neighborhood I grew up were all in the same boat; only we didn’t know we were poor.

But school was the great harmonizer. In those days, us poor kids went to school with the rich, and we became their friends, visited their homes and got to learn about how different our life styles were.

Later on, I went to work and found out that my struggles had become part of the Middle Class. It wasn’t exactly a big dea; but it meant a lot to us in those days.

It seemed that the War had changed everything.

Guys were coming back from the War with money. And all of a sudden people wanted. We wanted everything. From washing machines to hi fidelity systems.

Later, when TV came out, we had to have it—even for most of us it was a little box with a magnifier over it.

We were now definitely “Middle Class.”

The Middle Class in those days seemed to be a laudable goal. You were middle class so you lived decently, you had decent clothes, and you could afford decent food. You went to decent movie houses and talktook short, inexpensive vacations and soon discovered you were just like everyone else. Who can forget the tons of Irish who spent every summer on the beaches of Rockaway. Or the Italians who bought little plots of land at Shirley and Mastic and thought it was grand to have your own pink flamingoes or the scores of others who escaped to do some camping upstate or went to Lake Ronkonkoma for a day at the beach.

We all read the same newspapers, we talked about the same things, listened to Fibber, Gracie Alan, and the Great Gildersleeve. We also listened to the same news or caught it on the Pathe news that seemed to take a week or more to appear on our own theatre screens.

The War had changed things.

Because the Middle Class got out there, built the ships and the tanks ad the planes and joined the legions of troops who thought we were doing the right thing.

Now, we inhabit a different world.

I still have a pretty good income but it’s no longer what it used to be.
Now, we can’t get by on my income. My wife has to work, too.
And, mostly, we can’t afford to go out for anything bigger than a burger or a pizza every once in a while.

But .most of the time, those in our group “get together.” We visit each other, bring a dish or do something modest.

We don’t do the things we used to do.

My cars are plain and functional.

Absolutely nothing on my car is push button….Even though at the price of gasoline, I should be driving a grande coach….

I have to think about every penny I spend. I still give to Democratic causes but I have to be very judgmental. I may give to this but I can’t afford to give that.

Why? Everything has leaped ahead in cost. My old prescription for just one drug went from ten dollars to about a 140 dollars a month. My home costs including home heating oil has jumped through the roof. I’m still paying for December.

It now costs me about 100 bucks to go visit the kids, not including the milkshakes, meals and gifts. After all, grandpa ad grandma can’t go in empty handed.

Things have just gotten out of control.

We hear about people who can’t afford to eat and take their medicine at the same time.

This is the middle class.

I find the condition of the Middle Class disturbing. I get the distinct feeling that we are like the mythical Aardvark or the Dodo, doomed to distinction but we don’t yet know it.

Only, if we’re doomed to distinction, the experiment with democracy is over. Dead. Ground into the ground by our republican slavers.

If that should happen, there would be no separation between rich ad poor and we would begin to look like a banana republic very quickly.

I hope it doesn’t happen; but the trend doesn’t look good.

The fact is that we have been whittled down by illegal immigration, HBI passes, Green cards. Our jobs have wound up in other countries where the labor costs are less. Our numbers dwindle daily as US industries who cannot see past their noses do not seem capable of competing.

The whole myth of the Greening of America which gave the green light to exporting jobs brought this on and I am still convinced that the whole damned book was a republican plot to give away our jobs and make us all dependent on minimum wage jobs. I wrote an editorial on this and it made the NYTimes, believe it or not. Nobody ever said I was wrong!

Meanwhile productivity continues to rise all over the place but it’s a myth that those increases in productivity get passed along to the worker.

For the most part, they go to top management, the ones with the Golden Parachutes who make 400 times what the lowly floor worker gets.

Yes, beginning with Reagan, our national wealth got redistributed so that today fewer than 5% control about 75% of the nation’s wealth.

And all the other numbers produced by our various statistical departments—ranging from the great unemployment figures to all of the inflation figures in my mind are up for grabs!...

Too bad, I used to think that we were something permanent—something that would be part of the landscape forever.

Clearly, I was wrong!

Les Aaron


Les Aaron