No Country For Old Men
Millions of Americans are wrestling with the impossibility
of a traditional middle-class existence. In homes across the country,
kitchen tables are strewn with unpaid bills. Lights burn late
into the night. The same calculations get performed again
and again, over and over, through exhaustion and sometimes
tears. Wages minus grocery receipts. Minus medical bills.
Minus credit card debt. Minus utility fees. Minus student loan
and car payments. Minus the biggest expense of all: rent.
….What parts of this life are you willing to give up, so you can
keep on living?
….When do impossible choices start to tear people —
a society — apart?
Excerpt, Nomadland by Jessica Bruder p. 247
I finished reading Nomadland. The story was heartrending. Social forces, institutional trends of long duration, maybe a generation or more, have intersected to become crushing circumstances for many families and individuals in our country. Nomadland suggests that we are quite some distance down the road to becoming a society without pity, bereft of empathy. Bruder writes:
The cause of the unimaginable household math that’s keeping people up at night is no secret. The top 1 percent now makes eighty-one times what those at the bottom half do, when you compare average earnings. For American adults on the lower half of the income ladder — some 117 million of them — earnings haven’t changed since the 1970s.
That’s not a wage gap — it’s a chasm.
