April 24, 2013 - Special Greeting to Readers

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

Special Hello to Readers! Thank you to my readers from the U.S., Russia, Spain, Finland, Italy, Germany, U.K., South Korea and even Albania! I am so excited to see that I am having new readers and return readers, too, as the page counts grow every day (thank you, thank you!). It is very gratifying after having worked on this project so hard for so long to see the response in the numbers of you who are 'tuning in,' daily. Please don't be shy - please leave a comment and I will certainly respond. One of the goals for me in writing Slave Nation was to stimulate a conversation that would challenge the current climate of draconian and unfriendly attitudes and policies which affect women and their 'work' in the United States.

To start that conversation off I will sum up how life is for most non-professional American women under our current political, economic and social system in one sentence: They MUST work (for discounted wages), they MAY have children (If dumb enough to have more than one (unless they are wealthy), that is due to their own lack of self-control or planning and is going to cost plenty more in daycare*) and they WILL be the primary provider of all things domestic in the home, regardless of how many hours labored in the marketplace. And it is much worse if you are a black or Hispanic woman. What kind of an incentive plan is that for women to do anything but refuse to have children? What do you think? 

If you are a reader from out of the states, I would be very interested to hear about life for women and children in your country, and what your perspective is on the wealth gap in America and how it harms our women and children (especially our elderly women). 

*(Despite the fact that our birth rate has been below replacement levels for four solid decades, and we need children now more than ever; they should not be considered shocking lapses of judgment that must be stoically managed around, these are the children who will support us collectively and individually in our old age - skimping on children is a bad plan for our future.)

Now, on to our regularly scheduled programming:

Another very serious and very grave reason for a homekeeper revival would be the actual health of our children, both mental and physical. The gift of being raised by your own mother is a gift that never stops giving, even down through generations. Consider what has happened to the actual physical health of our children since the flight of homekeepers into the job market. I believe that the obesity epidemic in our country can be directly traced to the flight, and I will argue it is the number one reason our youth now face this crisis. (Closely related to the obesity crisis is the female and child poverty rate in this country which is shameful, and is a critical reason why women should leave the paid work place: because it has impoverished them and their children.)

Now add to that the tsunami of "disorder" diagnoses which have made American children the most medicated and most-highly narcotized group of juveniles on the entire planet, and ask yourself, is this really better than what we abandoned? Is this really going to be worth the lost generation (or more) of children who will struggle with socially-induced drug addiction as they pass from childhood into adulthood with full-blown addictions to these medications? Did we go to work so that our children could be fat and narcotized to keep them docile and manageable while we warehouse them so that we can go to same employment (paying large portions of our salaries to taxes to operate the behemoth public school industry - a prime example of 'forging our own chains if ever there was one)? Did we really have our children so that they could become guinea rats in the highly profitable mass-pharma experimentation which is now being conducted sub rosa on their persons?

Related to the obesity crisis is the empty neighborhood crisis. Without a parent at home “latch-key” children are less likely to go outside and play. This is the result of not only the fact that children need to be prodded sometimes to get fresh air, but because of actual safety concerns. When women stay home they are a constant presence in the neighborhood and less mischief in general is likely to happen where it can be easily observed. Homekeepers help keep neighborhoods safe and free of crime when they are present in large enough numbers, leaving neighborhoods safe for children to play and exercise (another benefit of safe neighborhoods is higher home values).

I challenge mothers (or fathers, if their wives can earn more through employment for the family than they can) to find a way to stay home with their children. To argue that your child would rather have dollars than your presence, to have objects rather than to be able to come home from school to his own home, is disingenuous and not worth serious discussion (ask them!); it will be a challenge, and the work will be hard, no doubt, but it is what is best for your children and your family and for these years individualism is not a good pairing with parenting.

The primary challenge for women to do this is obviously the financial part of the equation. I doubt there are too many women who work who feel that they could afford to leave their job, but I challenge them to really scrutinize the costs of working, and the costs of  items like prepared foods (honest accounting here will mean calculating the future medical bills that will accompany eating these kinds of food), the skyrocketing costs of transportation and work clothing. As I said before, frugality has always been the backbone of the single income earner model. You can learn to be frugal; you just have to be conscious of what you want in exchange for your efforts. 

A larger social benefit of living simply is that by leaving the workforce (if you can) you can collectively raise the wages and prospects for those who can't - single mothers head over half of the households in the U.S. that are deemed to be below the Federal poverty level; if female labor were not so cheap and plentiful they would be able to command higher wages, giving their families a chance to climb out of poverty which would benefit all of us who aren't 1%'ers.

You can also look at your assets – sell things that you can, downsize your home, move to a less expensive part of the country, have your mom live with you for childcare while you work part time. There are literally thousands of internet sites and blogs dedicated to this frugal movement; you can find plenty of ideas to move in the right direction online, and I will discuss them in further chapters dedicated to the “how to” portion of this radical exiting of the workforce I envision. Americans used to be ridiculously creative - I'm sure enough of a vestige of that creativity remains to turn the tide that has nearly destroyed the American family. I hope so.

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.