Sort of In Memoriam

TC eulogizes Barbara Ehrenreich: 

 LIKE MOST PEOPLE when I think of Barbara Ehrenreich I always think of her best known book Nickled and Dimed in which she did some Nellie Bly style reportage by taking some minimal wage, awful jobs and trying to live on the money she made while reproducing the living conditions, travel, etc. that are the daily experience of the working poor.  I admired the book very much and still find some of what she said in it insightful, especially her admission that she could only approximate the mental experience of People who knew they were trapped in that life because he knew it was a time-limited project and she would return to her life as a writer and intellectual.

I have a friend who went to seminary in Louisville, KY.  One of the courses he took there required an "urban experience" where students were dropped off in parts of very old Louisville, neighborhoods with houses that dated back to the last century, working class neighborhoods originally and not having gentrified a jot over the decades.  The idea was to spend 24 hours in the area with a few dollars in your pocket, to get some "shock" notion of what poverty was like for the working poor.  It wasn't meant to make them live the life of a poor person; just to give them some experience of it, most of them being middle-class students from middle-class suburban lives.

My friend was dropped off a block or so from the house he and his wife lived in, the one my wife and I visited them in one our trip there a few months later.  He turned and walked the other way.  But it gives you an idea what even the best-intentioned notions of "poverty" and "shock" can turn into.

I am reading (Simone Weil's) essays as a part of my Lenten reading...She says that we "...must experience every day, both in the spirit and the flesh, the pains and humiliations of poverty...and further we must do something which is harder than enduring in poverty, we must renounce all compensations: in our contacts with the people around us we must sincerely practice the humility of a naturalized citizen in the country which has received us." 

I keep reminding the young people who come to work with us that they are not naturalized citizens...They are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor. So we have to make up for it by "renouncing all compensations..."

Dorothy Day, from The Dorothy Day Book, p. 11. 

I remember reading Nickel and Dimed, especially a passage where Ehrenreich chides her friends who hire housecleaners because they can't be bothered to do the work themselves.  She also discusses working for one company, a nationwide chain, that required its workers to clean floors on their hands and knees, because the visual made the clients think they were getting their money's worth.  I use a steam mop on the tile floor in my kitchen.  It's not the visual of a bucket and a handbrush and me on my 67 year old knees, but it gets the floor much cleaner much faster.

Some of that book has stayed with me.  But the small bits I've read from the pen of Dorothy Day have meant much more to me.  Ehrenreich challenged my experiences of the world, at one time; Dorothy Day challenges my underestanding of my place among everyone else in society everytime I turn to her.