My parents, brother, and I knelt around the couch. It had a musty smell that was familiar and comforting. We knelt around the couch at least every day to pray. This time we were out of money and out of food. This was not the first time, and it wasn’t the last. My family was one of many of the working poor, the lower class.
We lived in a run-down little house in the country, my clothes were second-hand, Sundays were for church and NASCAR, and my Mom homeschooled my brother and me. There is no shortage of terms to describe who I was. White trash, hillbilly, redneck.
By the end of high school, my parents’ relentless work had turned our life from groceries at the food bank to groceries at Costco. Our run-down little house was renovated and expanded to become a dream home. We had entered the middle class.
I learned two things on my way to the middle class. People and the social structures they create are designed to keep the lower class out. Ridiculing my way of life and what I found joy in is commonplace, encouraged, and entirely socially acceptable.
The second one stung the most and leaves bitterness in my heart today.
We went to a Pentecostal church on a highway through Brockville. And like all good Pentecostal congregations after church, everyone headed to Swiss Chalet. My family could never afford such outings but we were driving in the same direction to get gas. We fondly referred to our family car as The Bondomobile as it was more bondo (a brownish paste used to patch rust spots) than anything else. One Sunday the Bondomobile ran out of gas not a kilometre from the church parking lot. Our fellow congregants drove past seemingly blind to our struggle. My Dad pushed our car, my Mom in the driver’s seat steering, my brother and I, not 6 and 7, taking it all in from the back seat.
My family is not the first poor rural family that has been looked down on. We weren’t the first to face difficulty or social exclusion. Families like mine struggle publicly every day. And every day their middle and upper class peers drive right on past, rationalizing their indifference by demanding the poor make better choices.
There is an important qualification to make and it’s about choice and the ability to make one. First off, no one ever chooses to go hungry, and there is a difference between poverty and the lower class or the working poor. No one chooses poverty. There are people who choose to stay in the lower class. Not everyone dreams of a house in the suburbs and climbing the corporate ladder. Lots of families are content with being lower class. Social and economic class feels different to different people. Staying in your small town where you raise your family with an extended family so that your kids can play in the same creeks and woods you grew up in is a noble and honourable choice. If that choice means a run-down little house and a beater car, it still remains and is a respectable choice. And that choice needs to be treated with the dignity it deserves. But that should be a choice, and if a corporate career and a house in the suburbs is someone’s dream they should be given every opportunity to pursue that.
Most questions surrounding why the working classes make the choices they do involve their responsibility to their families. There are no empty nester parents off on a European river cruise. There are parents who work well into retirement age and when work is no longer an option, helping with the kids of those off at work is. When a cousin needs gas money, when a sister needs a ride to rehab, these problems have but one solution. Family. Money solves and hides the problems of the middle class, family does for the lower class.
For those hoping to take the path out of the lower class, it is a narrow and difficult one. It absolutely involves a chance or opportunity, a break as it’s sometimes called. It involves being prepared to out-work everyone at every turn. It means navigating a structure designed to keep you out and demands you adhere to cultural norms you won’t have learned. It requires an inner confidence that is unshakeable because the path out is designed to humiliate.
Being poor didn’t stop me from having an incredibly charmed childhood. Once we finally got gas in the old Bondomobile we headed for home and did what we did every Sunday: spend time as a family. My Mom read to my brother and me endlessly. My Dad would come home from working a double shift and tell us to grab our skates and we’d be off playing hockey. Neither of my parents ever missed a basketball game, a swim lesson, a ballet practice, nothing. They cheered me on at every moment. Every challenge was met with the full attention of my parents. And at every turn I had a brother who was and is my best friend. I had grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins who poured into my life. When I failed time and time again, when life made things seemingly impossible, I knew I was loved and I knew they believed I could do it.
It was the most valuable gift they ever could have given me.
But I was poor. The treasures my family gave me, the lessons they taught me, were dismissed because of the kind of car we drove, the second-hand clothes I wore. The climb into the middle class is a precarious one demanding much of what makes you be abandoned.
One of the books that impacted my life the most is Road to Character by David Brooks. He touches on a really important question: which person are we working on developing? The person inside of us achieving outward success, or the person in us responsible for our character? There is nothing wrong with material success. But are we the type of people who help a family stranded on the side of the road?
I’ve been in the middle class more of my life now than in my lower-class childhood. I’m here to tell you the bitterness never goes away. My experiences aren’t as obvious as they once were, and there have been many times when someone has made a crack about hillbillies around me, and every time I go back to the back seat of our old Bondomobile and I know they’d drive right on by. And I hate them for it. I cheer when their grip on the levers of power loosens, hope that they are humbled as my family was. That they will know what it means to struggle.
So when I see politicians and musicians, when I see anyone defending and pushing back against those who have attempted to keep the lower class down, it feels good. It feels damn good. And don’t anyone dare ask me to act on some higher calling or duty. A sense of community and obligation that so many of my social class have never received the benefit of. I don’t think so.
So when you’re angry about the state of politics, when you wonder why people vote the way they do, know that their experiences aren’t far off of mine. They’ve been left on the side of the road, at every turn their efforts have been hampered by systems that see no value in them, and the aspects of their lives they value most are often completely discredited and devalued. They are bitter. And they have every right to be.
And if you’re wondering what needs to be done, may I suggest the solution starts with you. Respect my choices and allow me the dignity of making my way through life in a way that is meaningful to me. They don’t need to be your choices, but it is your choice how you treat us. And if you see an old beat-up car with a Dad pushing his family to the gas station, pull on over. Offer your help, not as a patron, but as a friend. It will make all the difference in the world.
