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
http://livingwage.mit.edu/
There is another very
real social tension over the worth of a supported woman who doesn’t “work,”
whether or not she must to survive, as seen in the recent case of Anne Romney
being called out for ‘never working a day in her life.’ That tension is part
and parcel of the social culture of gender-feminist-driven “choice,” and
“individualism” that has permeated society for the last fifty-plus years. Its
propaganda clouds our thinking when it comes to homekeepers, casting them in
the roll of an almost willful parasite - unemployable at best, weak or stereotypically
self-indulgent or lazy, at worst -
rather than as some of society’s toughest and most valuable human capital.
In short, we have
confused the value of women’s actual contributions to their families and
communities with the act of earning
income, mistakenly assigning value in direct proportion to earnings,
somehow managing the mental acrobatics necessary to ignore the numerous
services the homekeeper provides when we assign ‘worth.’ Because of this we
value women who do not earn income less than we value those who do, which is
not exactly an incentive package for these women to jump into the unpaid
avocation of homekeeping. At a time when we need to woo women across all economic and educational sectors back
into the home we need to do better by them in terms of respect, at the very
least.
And while we are
examining our values and beliefs, how did it become an accepted part of who we
are and how we live that we farm the majority of our children out to so-called
“child care,” rather than pay ourselves
to raise them at home? Although I make the case that child-caring is only one
facet of homekeeping, it is nonetheless one of the most important jobs a
homekeeper performs, and the results of how that job is done resonates through
our culture. Therefore, I ask: How can
we thrive as a democracy when the lowest paid members of society are the main
care-givers during infancy and early childhood for our future voters and
decision makers? Why do we allow our children’s values to potentially be shaped
and formed by the least educated, lowest paid and most transient members of the
workforce? Why do we accept the “inevitability” and consequences of stranger childcare
as if there were not a perfectly good alternate solution to raising children –
a model that worked very well for millennia?
I also want to ponder our
actual quality of life in the United States in 2013.To paraphrase Ronald
Reagan, are you better off now than you were fifty years ago? Is life better
now by measurable indicators? I would argue not. We have gone from being one of
the healthiest countries in the world to one that is raising children who are
currently projected to have shorter life expectancy's than their parents,
courtesy of a raging epidemic of self-induced obesity.
We are now a country where appointed Supreme
Court justices uphold the rights of corporations,
whose lawfully mandated goal is to
create profit, to spend without limit in elections (predicated on the farce
that corporations are people, fully imbued with 1st Amendment rights),
thereby allowing elections to be sold to the highest bidder, regardless of
whether or not that will result in policies that will make life better or worse
for families.
Women and children are poorer now than they have been in the last
90 years in this country. I want to repeat that: Women and Children are poorer
now than they have been in the last 90 years in this country, with 22% of children living under the laughably defined Federal Poverty Level. In short, we have
lost ground in every way that matters. We are poorer, sicker and less protected
than ever from instability in our home and national life. We did not do what we
needed to as a society to retain our homekeepers, and we are suffering the
consequences.
No comments:
Post a Comment