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Social Issues Mon Nov 30 2009
"I'll Just Go Back to Grad School"
My social, family and professional networks allow me to move pretty regularly through very diverse groups of people: people of color, WASPs, the poor and working class, immigrants, wealthy businesspeople, creative professionals, the highly educated and completely uneducated. So when one day, in line for coffee, I overheard the following, I was completely floored: a woman, about my age (late 20s) was complaining about some job she did not get. Off-handedly, she said, "I guess I'll just go back to grad school, like everybody else."
She was just being glib, but the profound wrongness of that statement and the inability of her or her friend to see the irony in it--I looked back; they weren't smiling--really shocked me. Did they understand how unbelievably fortunate they were to even be able to think about going to graduate school? How that made them among a very tiny group of human beings on the planet with that kind of opportunity?
Consider for a minute that less than 30 percent of American adults have a bachelor's degree. So more than 70 percent of Americans have no college degree. That is an enormous majority. Of those 70 percent, a clear majority never even attend college.
I think about that conversation often; it snaps into my mind anytime I come across a statistic that should remind people of just how many Americans don't have anything like the "equality of opportunity" crowed about by conservatives and neoliberals.
Think of the last eight friends or family members you talked to on the phone or over email. Is one of those eight people surviving on food stamps?
If not, you move in very fortunate circles. Because one out of every eight Americans can only get enough food to eat with the assistance of food stamps.
There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analysis of local data collected by The New York Times.
The counties are as big as the Bronx and Philadelphia and as small as Owsley County in Kentucky, a patch of Appalachian distress where half of the 4,600 residents receive food stamps.
In more than 750 counties, the program helps feed one in three blacks. In more than 800 counties, it helps feed one in three children. In the Mississippi River cities of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, half of the children or more receive food stamps. Even in Peoria, Ill. -- Everytown, U.S.A. -- nearly 40 percent of children receive aid.
Peoria is "Everytown, U.S.A." thanks to Richard Nixon and his phalanx of conservative ideologues, who coined the expression "Will it play in Peoria?" when designing their particularly pernicious brand of hateful identity politics. That original army of conservatives still infect our political class. That 40 percent of children in Peoria now survive only because of the social safety net that movement is intent on eroding to nothing is an irony that would surely be lost on them. Besides, when their children fall a little behind, they just go to grad school. Like everybody else.
Viva La Che / November 30, 2009 1:19 PM
You shouldn't confuse equality of result with equality of opportunity.
... and you apparently don't see the irony of projecting your own hateful brand of identity politics on that superficial cloak of compassion.