Sure, and adding to the difficulty is the pretty naked demonstrations of class-based hostility most of us have witnesses in our lives.
I mean, every time one hears someone go on a rant about, "I saw a woman buying steak with an EBT card, how dare she", it reminds one that there's this very venomous, very open, policing of one's class performance. It's okay to be poor, just so long as nothing you have is Too Nice, because then you are a Bad Poor, stealing from others. It's okay to be rich, just so long as you are folksy and/or ostentatiously generous, because otherwise one is a Snob. It's okay to be middle class, just so long as you aren't into anything Pretentious.
We can take money out of it and the problem is still there. I was having a convo with the professor who was basically my unofficial advisor in grad school, and while I respected the hell out of the guy for many reasons, he said to me that once I started working with poor people, I would find it difficult to go treat upper middle and upper class people, because poor people have real problems. And he launched into a whole story about how he once took as a client for couples counseling an upper middle class couple, and he wound up just yelling at them that they were making a mountain out of a mole hill, because they didn't have any real problems, and that caused them to resolve their conflict and not need any more treatment. Yeah, apparently in his reality, sexual assault, child abuse, cancer, schizophrenia, drunk driving accidents, and drug over doses don't happen to rich people. :|
I'm always reminded by these discussions of an incident on a local news blog, which reported on the salaries of top MBTA (subway/mass transit) employees. Commentors got all outraged that a third-shift track welder was making about $300k. I'm pretty sure that they're all okay with stockbrokers and CEOs and movie stars and NFL players making that kind of money or far more. But for a welder to earn that...! That, clearly, is not because this is a highly skilled craftsman on whose work other people's lives will literally depend, who is working in the middle of the damned night and this is what the market for that sort of labor requires, but because this is a profligate waste of our tax dollars. :|
This is the social world we live in. One in which if you let other people know what you earn, they will unleash their venomous opinions on you of whether you are perhaps making too much for a whatever it is they think you are, or whether you're not performing the class attributed you by your income.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 03:06 am (UTC)Sure, and adding to the difficulty is the pretty naked demonstrations of class-based hostility most of us have witnesses in our lives.
I mean, every time one hears someone go on a rant about, "I saw a woman buying steak with an EBT card, how dare she", it reminds one that there's this very venomous, very open, policing of one's class performance. It's okay to be poor, just so long as nothing you have is Too Nice, because then you are a Bad Poor, stealing from others. It's okay to be rich, just so long as you are folksy and/or ostentatiously generous, because otherwise one is a Snob. It's okay to be middle class, just so long as you aren't into anything Pretentious.
One of the reasons people are afraid of being open about their resources is becase of, well, exactly the phenomenon demonstrated in that MF thread: other people might decide you have too much. If you say, "I only make $x" someone might come along and say, "You make $x?!? I would kill to make $x! I make half that!" They might decide that you are unworthy of sympathy. They might decide to make some sort of example of you.
We can take money out of it and the problem is still there. I was having a convo with the professor who was basically my unofficial advisor in grad school, and while I respected the hell out of the guy for many reasons, he said to me that once I started working with poor people, I would find it difficult to go treat upper middle and upper class people, because poor people have real problems. And he launched into a whole story about how he once took as a client for couples counseling an upper middle class couple, and he wound up just yelling at them that they were making a mountain out of a mole hill, because they didn't have any real problems, and that caused them to resolve their conflict and not need any more treatment. Yeah, apparently in his reality, sexual assault, child abuse, cancer, schizophrenia, drunk driving accidents, and drug over doses don't happen to rich people. :|
I'm always reminded by these discussions of an incident on a local news blog, which reported on the salaries of top MBTA (subway/mass transit) employees. Commentors got all outraged that a third-shift track welder was making about $300k. I'm pretty sure that they're all okay with stockbrokers and CEOs and movie stars and NFL players making that kind of money or far more. But for a welder to earn that...! That, clearly, is not because this is a highly skilled craftsman on whose work other people's lives will literally depend, who is working in the middle of the damned night and this is what the market for that sort of labor requires, but because this is a profligate waste of our tax dollars. :|
This is the social world we live in. One in which if you let other people know what you earn, they will unleash their venomous opinions on you of whether you are perhaps making too much for a whatever it is they think you are, or whether you're not performing the class attributed you by your income.