Nickel and Dimed - On Not Getting By in America

Mike Lukovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This cartoon really impacted me because I saw it just after finishing Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

This book was inspired by the welfare-to-work reform of the 1990s; it attempts to answer the question: can a person live on minimum wage? Ms. Ehrenreich courageously endeavored to find out by actually living the life of a low-wage worker (she was in her 50s which makes her willingness to undergo the humiliations and physical strain even more admirable). She spent a month in three different cities, working as a chain restaurant waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart associate. She lived in housing and ate the food that was affordable at her wages. She lived in horrible places—a tiny trailer, a squalid motel, and ate fast food because of a lack of kitchen facilities. Working one job full-time, she could barely afford to cover her most basic expenses, and she had a lot of advantages: no children, and because this was a short-term experiment, she didn’t have to worry about medical expenses or things like clothing (other than what she had to purchase for the job).

This experiment was done in 1999 and 2000, before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when the country was experiencing prosperity and jobs were easy to get. This was also before corporations learned that they could save money by not hiring people as full-time workers. Ms. Ehrenreich tried to work two jobs so she could afford a better apartment; she just didn’t have the stamina required to pull off cleaning hotel rooms in the morning and waiting tables in the evening.

She also discusses the psychological effect of low-income work, that it encourages submissiveness and lack of initiative. At the same time, she makes clear that these are hard-working people, doing their best with the pitiful resources at their disposal.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, things are much worse, which after reading her account, is hard to imagine. Certainly, jobs are much harder to get. Ms. Ehrenreich was able to get a job almost instantly in 1999; today she might have spent her entire 30-day allotment just finding a job (if she was lucky).

Simultaneously Tragic and Beautiful

Recently I got an email from a friend who had just spent some time with her ex-husband. She wrote: “That whole energy seems so...odd to me now....and it's simultaneously tragic and beautiful...like life, I guess.” [I didn’t cut anything out; that’s how she writes.]

Simultaneously tragic and beautiful. Yes! Lately I have been seeing how everyone’s life has some tragedy or sadness in it. I’ve met a lot of people in the last six months and everyone seems to have some sad story to tell. Many are recently divorced, another’s foreign wife took his children to her country when the kids were 5 and 7 and he’s never seen them since, a couple others have children in jail or addicted to drugs, another found out the woman she thought was her mother wasn’t…

Most of us operate under the illusion that there are people who don’t suffer. We think there are people who really have their act together and don’t have the problems we do.

The news that Mother Teresa lived with depression for years shocked me, and I imagine, most people. We think someone with that kind of spiritual dedication should be beyond the sufferings of ordinary people like us.

St. Francis of Assisi is one of the best-known saints of the Catholic Church, widely admired today for his humble embrace of poverty and his peaceful attitude towards nature. Statues of St. Francis are ubiquitous in gardens. Here was a golden life, without tragedy, right?

St. Francis with Sultan al-Kamil
Wikimedia Commons

A review of two new biographies of St. Francis of Assisi in the New Yorker reveals the tragedy in the saint’s life. [“Rich Man, Poor Man: The Radical Visions of St. Francis,” by Joan Acocella, New Yorker Jan 14, 2013] Francis was from a wealthy family, and when he was about twenty-one, in 1202, he went to war. His side lost and he spent a year in prison. When he came out he was changed; he was no longer interested in partying with his friends, but spent entire days praying.

By 1206 he had renounced his inheritance and gained two followers. He believed that property aroused envy and conflict and was, Ms. Acocella writes, “the one thing most destructive to peace in the world…To be part of the [Franciscan] group, a man had to sell all his goods, give the money to the poor, and, like Francis, sever all ties with his family.”

In ten years his order of friars became incredibly popular, and grew to number in the thousands. Francis began sending friars to France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and the Middle East.

St. Francis went to Egypt in 1219 to try and convert the Sultan of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to Christianity in order to end the Crusades. He returned (the Sultan didn’t convert) with malaria and trachoma, a painful eye infection. He was also vomiting blood. During the last six years of his life he suffered tremendously from the pain of his physical ailments.