Class in my class
27/03/15 05:23
I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but I have a Facebook page. I signed up to follow the journey of a nephew several years ago. He was traveling in Central America and would post pictures on his Facebook page when he found an Internet cafe. Our church has a Facebook page and over the years, I have added friends when I receive requests from people that I know. I’m not a big one for putting up pictures, but I often enjoy the pictures others post. I installed the application on my phone and take a look at the posts of my friends when I am waiting for an appointment or meeting or have a small amount of extra time.
In the last week or so, I have been thinking a bit about my growing up years because a member of my class posted our first grade class picture and then other members of the class began to post individual school pictures that they had saved. I didn’t wear glasses until sometime in the third grade, so some of my classmates didn’t initially recognize the picture of me that was posted. My initial reaction was amazement that anyone had saved the pictures. Then I was totally amazed that the same person was so well organized that the pictures could be found. I’m not saying I don’t have things like that, just that I’d never be able to find them in the chaos of my boxes and files.
The thing about growing up in our town in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that at least as far as we kids we concerned, our town was a classless society. In that first grade picture is the son of our town’s only doctor and children of prominent businessmen. There is also a daughter of a family who lived across the street from the city dump and whose income came from salvage of what others had thrown out. There were children from farm and ranch families and children whose parents went through many different jobs and had spent some nights in the jail drying out. We all saw ourselves as a part of the same group - the same class in school and played together without distinction between those whose parents were rich and those who were poor, those who were educated and those who were not.
I’m told that in polls Americans are most likely to report that they are middle class even if they are in the lowest or highest 20% in terms of family income. Still, it seems to me that our family was quite average for my class. We weren’t the best off. We didn’t often get a new car and we never took a resort vacation, but the roof on our house rarely leaked and we got new appliances when the old ones wore out. we shared rooms with our siblings, and so did our classmates. Our house was on main street, but that wasn’t much of a distinction in our town. It certainly wasn’t the biggest house in town. Most of us had been in the homes of all of our classmates over the years that we went to school together and we frequently invited our classmates into our homes for meals, to work on school projects, or just co “come and play.”
It was fun to remember those times because things are different in my home town these days. If you go up the valley from town, you’ll see million dollar homes on places that used to be hardscrabble farms with tar paper shacks. There are a lot of homes in the county that are recreational homes - the owners have multiple homes and the one in our home county is rarely occupied in the winter. They come for a while and then go to another of their homes. For the most part these are people whose children are raised. When they do have children, the children go to school in other places. The town no longer has a dump, only a transfer station for a regional landfill, and whatever recycling that gets done isn’t a job for a family any more. There are a lot fewer working ranches in the county these days. The few real cowboys that remain mostly take care of the stock of non-resident landowners. No one expects Michael Douglas to work his own cattle and Ted Turner isn’t exactly a ranch hand. Brooke Shields has a few horses on her place, but no one has ever seen her or any of her friends ever actually riding one of them.
There are a lot fewer businesses on Main Street. The shop that housed our family’s farm machinery and feed store business was a thrift store for a while now it is privately owned and used as a storage facility. The cafe right next to it has been for sale for the last 15 years. The women who own it, one of whom is a classmate of mine, have begun to realize that there will be no customers for it and when the finally quit it will cease to be a cafe. The town’s upper class shop in other cities and those with fewer means drive the 60 miles to shop at Walmart.
The acceleration of the gap between rich and poor has been widely documented in the media. During the years that I was going to school and college the distribution of income was gradually becoming more equal. Two world wars and the Great Depression had flattened the economic pyramid in the US. But when I came into my adulthood and entered the workforce, that equalizing trend reversed. By the 1980’s the top tier of American income earners began to pull away from everyone else and now the very top has pulled away from the top. In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households. This is according to Congressional statistics quoted by Robert Putnam in his book “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”
I don’t think that my class produced any 1-percenters. But it appears that there is little class distinction among us on Facebook these days and that is refreshing and brings back a good memory of simpler times.
In the last week or so, I have been thinking a bit about my growing up years because a member of my class posted our first grade class picture and then other members of the class began to post individual school pictures that they had saved. I didn’t wear glasses until sometime in the third grade, so some of my classmates didn’t initially recognize the picture of me that was posted. My initial reaction was amazement that anyone had saved the pictures. Then I was totally amazed that the same person was so well organized that the pictures could be found. I’m not saying I don’t have things like that, just that I’d never be able to find them in the chaos of my boxes and files.
The thing about growing up in our town in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that at least as far as we kids we concerned, our town was a classless society. In that first grade picture is the son of our town’s only doctor and children of prominent businessmen. There is also a daughter of a family who lived across the street from the city dump and whose income came from salvage of what others had thrown out. There were children from farm and ranch families and children whose parents went through many different jobs and had spent some nights in the jail drying out. We all saw ourselves as a part of the same group - the same class in school and played together without distinction between those whose parents were rich and those who were poor, those who were educated and those who were not.
I’m told that in polls Americans are most likely to report that they are middle class even if they are in the lowest or highest 20% in terms of family income. Still, it seems to me that our family was quite average for my class. We weren’t the best off. We didn’t often get a new car and we never took a resort vacation, but the roof on our house rarely leaked and we got new appliances when the old ones wore out. we shared rooms with our siblings, and so did our classmates. Our house was on main street, but that wasn’t much of a distinction in our town. It certainly wasn’t the biggest house in town. Most of us had been in the homes of all of our classmates over the years that we went to school together and we frequently invited our classmates into our homes for meals, to work on school projects, or just co “come and play.”
It was fun to remember those times because things are different in my home town these days. If you go up the valley from town, you’ll see million dollar homes on places that used to be hardscrabble farms with tar paper shacks. There are a lot of homes in the county that are recreational homes - the owners have multiple homes and the one in our home county is rarely occupied in the winter. They come for a while and then go to another of their homes. For the most part these are people whose children are raised. When they do have children, the children go to school in other places. The town no longer has a dump, only a transfer station for a regional landfill, and whatever recycling that gets done isn’t a job for a family any more. There are a lot fewer working ranches in the county these days. The few real cowboys that remain mostly take care of the stock of non-resident landowners. No one expects Michael Douglas to work his own cattle and Ted Turner isn’t exactly a ranch hand. Brooke Shields has a few horses on her place, but no one has ever seen her or any of her friends ever actually riding one of them.
There are a lot fewer businesses on Main Street. The shop that housed our family’s farm machinery and feed store business was a thrift store for a while now it is privately owned and used as a storage facility. The cafe right next to it has been for sale for the last 15 years. The women who own it, one of whom is a classmate of mine, have begun to realize that there will be no customers for it and when the finally quit it will cease to be a cafe. The town’s upper class shop in other cities and those with fewer means drive the 60 miles to shop at Walmart.
The acceleration of the gap between rich and poor has been widely documented in the media. During the years that I was going to school and college the distribution of income was gradually becoming more equal. Two world wars and the Great Depression had flattened the economic pyramid in the US. But when I came into my adulthood and entered the workforce, that equalizing trend reversed. By the 1980’s the top tier of American income earners began to pull away from everyone else and now the very top has pulled away from the top. In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households. This is according to Congressional statistics quoted by Robert Putnam in his book “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”
I don’t think that my class produced any 1-percenters. But it appears that there is little class distinction among us on Facebook these days and that is refreshing and brings back a good memory of simpler times.