April 23, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

To make matters even worse, if they could be, the illusory extra income, while the illusion lasted, was spent in bidding wars against other families for homes in neighborhoods with the “good” schools, or on second and third cars, bigger televisions, obscenely large homes (McMansions, defined by Urban Dictionary as 'a large and pretentious house, typically of shoddy construction')  and expensive restaurants and hobbies. 

When the illusion of the “extra” income faded and reality set in, the families were frequently saddled with debt that enslaved their wives and mothers for the duration, rather than until the economy gained strength and they were able to return home, as they always had in the past after saving the family finances (ironically, the economy would gain strength - because of the large, cheap, fresh labor supply of women, but debt and increased appetites for consumption and conveniences sealed their fates). In 2013 full time homekeepers are so rare that there are only an estimated five million of them left (and falling), and they are demographically younger, less educated and far more likely to be foreign-born than the housewives of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

So, why does it matter? Why shouldn’t women work in the market place exactly the same as men? The answer to that is simple - because most female workers do not earn a fair or equal wage; if they could earn a living wage, this would be an entirely different conversation, but would still be based around reclaiming a society where one income can sustain a family in reasonable security and comfort. With nine out of ten women employed in the lowly-paid service sector,  it is safe to say that these women are not earning anything that approaches a fair living wage, especially when you consider that even they, at the very lowest rung of the employed economic ladder make less than men in their same classifications. The gender wage gap is blind to class, too; professional women suffer the same overall beginning ratio of underpayment as non-professional women, only at higher income levels with professional women earning $8000 less in their first jobs after graduation, than their male counterparts, initiating a gap which actually widens over time.

The next question is: Who needs homekeepers, anyway? The answer is simple: we all do, especially our children, especially in their infancy. In my own experience as a mother I have always known in my heart of hearts that it would be very unlikely that I would step in front of a speeding car to save another woman’s child, unless I had an extraordinarily close connection to the woman or child. It would have been unfair to my own who needed me; my first priority would always be to my own children. 

Therefore, I had to ask myself, how could I pretend to myself that it would be ok for another woman to have the main responsibility of keeping my children safe? When I took my children to the city pool, or to the beach, I never considered it the life guard’s responsibility to make sure my children didn’t drown. He was good back-up, but they were my progeny, my future, not his. No lawsuit or settlement would ever bring my children back if someone else didn’t do their job. And in fact, it wasn’t the lifeguard’s job, anyway, it was mine and mine alone. Parents are the people best-suited to raise their own children – because they have the biggest investment in their children’s survival.

We also need homekeepers to raise our children to be good and productive citizens who are able to manage this democracy the way it was intended to be managed – prudently, by an informed electorate who would hold the elected responsible for their actions. The state of our government in this country is a tragedy. We are now going on a third generation of voters (if they even vote, which is a different and even more tragic outcome) who have been raised from pre-K to college by strangers instead of their parents. Children enter daycare as young as two weeks old; from there they graduate to public schools that are better at crowd control and mass testing than they are at teaching the basics of critical thinking necessary for self-governance, or basic skills necessary for life. It is inevitable that the influences of strangers will eventually affect our children’s world view, and not necessarily in ways that match our own.

Equally harmful to our children and our way of life is the single most necessary element to control the large gatherings of children in one place that are a signature of our collectivist childcare system: conditioned obedience. A herd mentality is not only encouraged but vigorously insisted upon, and harshly enforced in our child care centers - at whatever age or grade children may be (public schools are the number one form of subsidized childcare in our nation).

Critical thinkers, learning questioners and children who are just too active for the sedentary school environment are labeled as troublemakers, and learn to endure a constant stream of disapproval. Children who are not suited to the rigid, highly-regulated environment that is our public school system are now routinely drugged with highly addictive narcotics which make them passive and sedate, often at the insistence of the school personnel – in order to be “focused” enough to absorb the material they need to be able to regurgitate during “testing,” so that they can eventually be “successful.” It is just easier to control a room full of 30+ students when they are toned down with their daily dose of chemical compliance.  Drugged obedience, and herd mentality are not the building blocks of a healthy and prosperous democracy. I just can’t say it any more plainly than that.