“Like a third world country.” It’s been quite a favorite phrase with the TV reporters. It’s become a meme.
It has punch, impact, it gets attention. What it doesn’t get from the overwhelming majority of the US public who don’t get it, is reflection, a light bulb over the head moment.
What do you think that means, a third world country?
First and foremost, it means poverty.
A poverty so pervasive that one cannot walk the streets without seeing it, despite the best efforts of “security personnel” armed with anything from sticks to automatic weapons, for the purpose of keeping the area relatively “clean” so that nice folks like you can shop without the plague of beggars, pickpockets and assorted riff-raff, or as they are called in the US, “cockroaches.”
Being a third world country means having a very small and select affluent elite and a teeming mass of people who are so desperately poor they can’t even scrape together the bucks for a used car or a hotel room. People who have never had a car, whose only experience with hotel rooms would involve cleaning them.
In a third world country, there’s not much of a middle class. There may be some who are less wealthy than others, but the big divide is the wall. The wall around your house, the high wall, with the locked gate. And your position vis a vis the “security personnel.” If you are affluent, they won’t shoot you. You are, after all, paying them. If you are poor, they will shoot you. That is, after all, what they are paid to do.
If you’re in a third world country, that means that if you have means, you are empowered to spend them on security guards for your own home. In addition to the wall. And a guard to accompany you to work. And return home to accompany your family as they go shopping.
Obviously, unless you are not only “discretionary income” class, but quite a bit beyond that, the security guard’s salary is going to have to come from somewhere. Maybe the kids’ college money. How about that health insurance premium? Maybe little Heather will just have to grow up with crooked teeth. And it will definitely nix those plans for the family vacation in Hawaii, or that time share in the Bahamas. Even that rustic little cottage on the lake will have to transform itself into wall, guards, gates, guns.
Many Katrina victims who did have the resources to evacuate before the storm are now realizing that they are poor. Credit card maxxed out, insurance won’t pay, mortgage company says have a month or two grace, but then you HAVE to pay, so does the IRS. FEMA says you qualify for a few hundred dollars. Hopefully by the time that’s gone, you’ll have saved enough from your new job at Wal-Mart to buy some food and a plastic tarp for your house, if it’s liveable at all. If not, it’s camp out in the car, or live in a shelter.
Americans who live check to check are not just the low wage earners. Few car and homeowners with even a little discretionary income think Kissinger’s reference to “useless eaters” meant THEM.
Phasing out the middle class, however, means exactly that. It means that unless you have a LOT of money, there is not a place for you in America’s future. Once your resources are gone, once you simply cannot pay that mortgage, and that car note, and the health insurance, AND the credit cards, the difference between you and those terrified looking people from the housing projects consists of an expensive education that means nothing to the Wal-Mart manager, and for a couple of weeks, a better haircut. You, too are low cost expendable labor, and if you whine that six dollars an hour is not enough to purchase housing, there are plenty of folks lined up out there who know that housing is out of the question, but they will take the six dollars in hopes of buying food to hoard in their shopping cart under the overpass, or their sister-in-law’s two bedroom apartment until she suggests that they really need to start looking for their own space.
Under that overpass can get a lot like a miniature version of the New Orleans convention center pretty quick, and if neither you nor your sister in law are used to living with 12 people in 1200 square feet of space, that option is not going to be much better after a while.
You may have noticed that it seems to take more and more money just to stay in the same place. Maybe you’ve already cut out extras, and can’t really say you have discretionary income any more, unless you count discretion as trying to charge your VISA balance to your MasterCard in hopes of lowering your monthly minimum payment by $14. You may have already started to use those cards to pay for a new tire here, a hefty summer electric bill there, that prescription that your insurance doesn’t cover, the deductible for your daughter’s broken arm, the deductible you increased so you could afford the “co pay” at all. Yes, you’re lucky, your employer pays for part of your coverage!
Maybe your homeowners’ insurance went up just a little, and so did your property taxes, and that little just happened to be the diaper budget. Whip out the MasterCard and charge up a year’s supply of Pampers at CostCo.
And soon, your minimum payment will double. If you can’t handle that, and the rest of the bills, you’re a useless eater. You’re poor. And you know what America thinks of poor people.
When your town’s name is called, you will not be on the high ground of the French Quarter.
And you would be well advised to stay out of your old neighborhood. The new owners of your house have armed guards.
Related link: Advice for the New Poor
