Living without any real hope of the future… changes you.
— Ian Welsh, from “The Personal Politics of Hopelessness”
I talk a lot about hope. And I’ve talked about being a class-jumper, thanks to the hard work of my parents, and my own hard work, and luck. I think hard about the path of my life: the circumstances that took me from a comfortable home to a crumbly one, enough money to not enough, and then propelled me like a rocket into one of the most elite schools on the planet, still poor and suddenly aware that the people I’d thought were “rich” in the relative backwater of Tampa, Florida probably couldn’t have gotten in the front door with the parents of the kids I saw around me. I learned about a whole new kind of rich those four years.
And I learned again the lessons of not enough as soon as I left St. Paul’s. But I knew that somehow I had to find my way back to enough. And it wasn’t just about money anymore — what I learned at my privileged prep school was that elite people had richness of experience. Richness of life.
Part of that richness, I now understand, has to do with the privilege of a baseline assumption that things will always work out. And one of the hardest things about being poor, apart from the actual experience of poverty, is the baseline assumption that things will not work out. This baseline assumption, and its pervasive influence on individual humans and the culture as a whole, is very well explained in this Huffington Post essay by Ian Welsh on the personal politics of hopelessness.
It’s really speaking to me. I haven’t had his experience — I’ve never been on welfare, and I do have a BA, and there’s that prep school education — but I’ve had the shitty jobs, sometimes three at a time, and I’ve felt some of these same feelings. Those are hard stories to tell without sounding either self-aggrandizing (oh, look how much I’ve suffered) or self-pitying (oh, look how much I’ve suffered) or self-justifying (it’s okay that I’m a solidly middle-class well-educated white girl because oh, look how much I’ve suffered). So I won’t try today. But I’m thinking about those times, and I’m feeling for the people who are in them right now.
I often get prickly when people talk about “the elites.” I dislike categorization, and I have enough experience of being both elite and oppressed that it gets a little confusing for me sometimes. But I get what Welsh is talking about in this article: and I am sorry to say that I think he’s right, that there’s an elite class in this country that doesn’t get it at all because they have no direct reference points of any kind on which to base an empathic* response. I don’t think every rich person is this kind of elite; but I’ve met the true elite, and among them are people with the puzzled, amused stare of utter lack of understanding: Well, just get your dad to put some more money in your account.
We are reaping the whirlwind of What Happens When Those Folks are In Charge. Part of what happens is the spread of personal hopelessness. That angers me, and somehow makes me feel ashamed as well, for reasons that aren’t clear to me.
Anyway, I think it’s a great essay, and I’d like to know what you think of it.
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(* with a nod to Robin)
