I foolishly and selfishly thought that my comfortable middle-class upbringing would shield me from knowing financial instability. I was wrong. Lazy. Entitled. Get a better job. If you’ve been paying attention to the recent discussion on raising worker wages—often led by fast food worker protests—you’ve heard and read sentiments like these. No doubt, the issue […]
Despite all evidence to the contrary, all talks of privilege, all facts and statistics, many Americans still believe that if someone is struggling economically, they are morally suspect and should somehow work harder. Whether citizens of the United States will admit it or not, we are in the midst of a great delusion about class and income […]
Money helps you make the judgment call for essentials versus desires. But when your funds are zero, everything is as equally unattainable as it is up for grabs. “First the food, then the morality.” — Bertolt Brecht When my 13-year-old son came home from school on Thursday and saw me watching news clips about the […]
David Brooks devoted his column Tuesday to bemoaning moral relativism. The most sensational example Brooks trots out to highlight the lack of morals among the poor and uneducated comes from Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, his new book about the opportunity divide between college- and high school-educated America. It involves Elijah, a boy with a troubled […]
Soon, it became clear to me that my family was indeed very poor. Not just in terms of money, but also in terms of love and spirit. Recently in Hollywood I chanced upon an Oscar trophy replica etched with the words “Best Driver.” I promptly bought it for my father and sent the present to […]
Persistence doesn’t pay off for everyone. And Americans need to stop assuming that getting an education and a job is all it takes to get ahead. I’m not a person who typically gets bent out of shape about opinions on social media enough to comment on them. This is due to collective realizations that 1. […]
