This time in Lombard IL, much further South than Barrington IL, location of the last anecdote. Lombard is near what used to be called “Silicon Prairie” and has a correspondingly much higher Asian population percentage. (I haven’t bothered to look it up. I have eyes and can also read restaurant signs. None of the signs in Barrington say “Indian Cuisine” or “Vietnamese Cuisine”) Nonetheless Lombard is another upscale white collar community. I had taken my sister shopping and I was talking about the Bernie Sanders YouTube video that was linked to in a post here. My sister is an old time ’70s Liberal Feminist. I was talking about main stream politicians in the soup aisle and how worthless they are when another old lady turned and said, “And that’s why I’m voting for Trump!” I felt a surge of anger but kept a poker face. My sister turned and said,”That’s why I’m a Sanders supporter!” The stranger quickly replied, “Oh! Trump and Sanders are both OK, the others aren’t worth voting for!” She proceeded to tell her life story. She’s 74, the same as my sister. She has a B.A. from a local small Liberal Arts College, one that used to be a private woman’s college. She used to be an upper middle manager for a very big company. She was laid off at age 58 when the whole division she worked for was moved to India. That would have been 1999/2000 by her story. Dot Com Bust, layoffs were plentiful. I only lasted until 2001. My sister made it to 2002. This woman never got another job. Being a middle manager she had a good 401K and a lot of savings, but those are almost all gone now. She’s lived her whole life in Lombard but the taxes (DuPage County) are draining her. She tried to get a job at Burger King but when the boss hesitated a younger Latino worker (an illegal she called him, but how would she know?) called out, “You can’t hire her, Boss! She’s too old! She’ll never keep up!” Once she ran a division of a large company, now she’s humiliated applying for a job frying potatoes. We commiserated. My sister explained she and I were former IT professionals and the same thing happened to us. My sister got a part time job stuffing envelopes, but that petered out after five years. Too old to be quick enough. I silently thanked fate for my postal job. Without those eleven years of earnings and the pension, I would be in the same boat as my sister and the other lady. We talked some more and discovered we all hated the New York banks. My sister would like to see the bankers in jail. The woman wanted to see their bodies in the street. I thought of Mussolini and his girl friend and silently agreed with the woman.
It’s easy to dismiss this woman as a privileged white Suburbanite with a lot of racial prejudice and say that she has her just desserts. “When tomorrow is today, the bell may toll for some, but nothing can stop the shape of things to come.” However, I take it as one more indication of the angry mood of the electorate. I understand the anger. All three of us were told as kids that if we just studied hard and worked hard, we would have good lives, not be facing eviction and dog food in our old age. Meanwhile the TBTF banks are four times bigger than they were before the meltdown. They are the true beneficiaries of TARP and QE. That thought of Jamie Dimon and Hank Paulson hanging by their heels from a street light does bring a smile to my lips.
I also am interested in “Trump or Sanders, the others are all worthless.” Yes, faceless apparatchiks like Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Clinton. It’s like the last days of the Soviet Union with the faceless gray men. And I never would have thought that a woman with that background would even consider Sanders without spitting. Our parents were blue collar children of immigrants who worshiped the ground FDR walked on, but I’m sure her parents were Republicans who cursed him.
Anecdotes are just that, but I wonder what will happen as I watch the stock market nosing over for another dive. FDR II with a Newer Deal? Or Fascist Amerika? (sic)