Every now and then, as Kathy Thorndike stood on the curb near the park where the Occupy The New Hampshire Primary encampment is located, and as she waved her signs demanding that big money be excised from our politics, a car would drive by and someone would blow their horn and a sleek young voice would tell her to get a job.What an amazing change in a generation. Nurses and carpenters are no longer assured of a place in the middle class. I'm reminded of my friend who was laid off his job in computer technology at age 62 and has not found a job three years later. He and his wife may yet lose their home. Companies are not falling over each other to hire folks in their late 50s and early 60s, even highly-skilled people with excellent references and experience. Many of the 'layabouts' are just such people as my friend.
As it happens, Kathy Thorndike has a job. She's a health-care administrator overseeing a geriatric care unit near her home in the lakes region around Laconia. As it happens, her husband has a job, too. He's a contractor who built his business after starting out as a laborer and then becoming a carpenter. As it happens, her parents had jobs, too. Her father was a podiatrist, her mother a nurse. As it happens, her children have jobs, too. Two of them are nurses. One of them is a contractor. As it happens, one of her daughters is underwater on her mortgage. Another one of her children has to work overtime at two jobs in order to provide for Kathy's grandchildren. The notion that Occupy is made up of unemployable layabouts is one of the things that makes Kathy Thorndike as angry as an otherwise mild person can get. The other is what she calls the "propaganda" that Occupy has no coherent message. Her message, she says, is the facts of her own life.
"People are really struggling in the middle class," she said here on Saturday afternoon, as a man in a long red robe carrying a sign saying "Fight American Imperialism" rang a cowbell not two feet down the sidewalk. "I was raised in the middle class. I raised my children in the middle class. My children are not middle class. They're all professionals — they're nurses and carpenters — but they're not able to be middle class anymore.
"I got to stay home with my children, and we were middle class, and my husband was a laborer, for goodness sake."
Read more by Charles Pierce at Esquire's The Politics Blog.
Most of the "Occupy ....." movements are just like Kathy Thorndike. Thoughtful concerned people who know what it is like to no longer be middle class. Good on her for waving her sign.
ReplyDeleteAmelia, it was the same in New Orleans. There were a few who appeared to be homeless, and they were welcomed into the group before the campers were driven out of Duncan Plaza.
ReplyDeleteI would think the homeless ones you refer to, Mimi, are surely in any case not homeless because they won't work but because they can't get any work.
ReplyDeleteI am quite sure genuine layabouts do exist but they are relatively small in number and I would imagine they wouldn't be politically motivated enough to turn up to something like an Occupy camp.
It's all rhetoric anyway, the right-wing asshole critics are well aware the Occupy movement is not made up of layabouts.
Cathy, the homeless include a number of the mentally ill, who do not take their medications, some of whom are very likely unemployable.
ReplyDeleteThe welfare cheaters cost the government small potatoes compared to the cost of tax breaks and bailouts of the corporations, with part the money going towards huge salaries and bonuses for the already very rich executives.
Good argument, Mimi. The Occupy Movement is telling all the dirty little secrets of our country.
ReplyDeleteThe Occupiers have changed the conversation in the country. If they do no more than call attention to the inequalities and injustices in our economic system, the groups will have done us a service.
ReplyDeleteI pay more taxes than General Electric. And I am comfortably paid, but no where near the 1%. Kinda sums it up.
ReplyDeleteIT, we have in common that we both pay more taxes than GE.
ReplyDeleteGP and I would be willing to pay more so folks less fortunate than we are could pay less.