Money is a sign of poverty. It took a few Scottish sci-fi authors to point this out, but it is the most obvious fact ab…
The Middle Class get to keep their money, but in exchange for a social isolation that horrified me when I first encountered it. The truth is, it still horrifies me. The American Dream of a middle class life that the poor, like myself, are supposed to reach for is a nightmare of alienation and loneliness. It takes its physical form in suburbs, and other living arrangements where you can die and be eaten by the cats over a period of months before anyone bothers to check on you.
Even the parent-child bond couldn’t survive the distance built by suburbs and allowances and that most dreaded of American institutions, financial independence.
In families, everything in the middle class pushes people to abandon each other as soon as they have the money to. Children are pushed to education and stable corporate jobs so that they can be shameless — never needing their families in any way. Parents are pushed towards saving for retirement, in either the hope of financially created independence or expectation that their grown children would never abide their presence.
Most of my friends now are middle class, and many of them barely have any relationship with their parents. The ones that do usually have large immigrant families that haven’t yet assimilated into the dream of American Loneliness.