Long essay on class

One night last January, near 11 p.m., I went to the nearest grocery store in Chester Springs, an affluent exurb of Philadelphia. In the parking lot, a very old and battered car was running and it looked like someone inside was asleep. Unsure of whether I should check on the occupant, I went into the store, got my groceries and came out to the same scene. I got my glasses out of my car to see better and saw a Hispanic man and woman slumped in the seats of the cluttered car, the back seat filled with baskets overflowing with laundry.

Had the occupants fallen asleep while leaving the engine running? Were they dead? I approached the car and called "Hello? Hello?" The man awoke and rolled down the window. I asked if he knew his car was running? He explained that the couple was waiting for a friend who worked at the grocery store whose shift was ending soon. The car was running because they were cold.

In the privileged bubble I inhabit, I was initially confused. Why didn't they wait somewhere warm, like Exton Diner? A cup of coffee doesn't cost much. But I forget the tacit agreement in the U.S. This couple was wearing soiled clothing, had either just been to or had yet to go to a laundromat, their banged-up car was running on spare tires, and they were in a well-to-do area, waiting to transport one of their own far away to a neighborhood where they could afford to live--probably a ramshackle apartment in Coatesville. Even if they had legal working papers, they may have feared being lumped with those who don't. Anything amiss and they could be deported.

We expect the working poor, regardless of citizenship or birthplace, to be invisible in the U.S. They are to cook our food, stock our stores, and landscape our gardens while keeping a low profile, living and shopping far from our manicured neighborhoods.

I'm sure if I went to some neighborhoods in Belfast, I could find people struggling to get by. But nowhere have I found anything like the devastation of people and place that is Chester, Camden, north Philly, even Coatesville. I don't expect to encounter anything like the Walker Evansesque scenes I see in the U.S. For starters, everyone has health care, a basic right denied many Americans, even with the ACA. Secondly, there's an excellent public transportation system connecting someone who can't afford a car to a job. Third, the minimum wage here is $10.47 per hour, compared with $7.25 in the U.S. (but $2.13 for tipped restaurant workers). If the three people sharing that car in Chester Springs each made $10.47 an hour and had free health care, I wonder how their lives would change? The average wage is $8/hour at that store. I have not found the cost of living here to be any higher than in the U.S., although I haven't bought much besides groceries or priced anything other than sofas.

The artist I met in Bangor said her parents emigrated to the U.S. but returned to Belfast when she was young. "In the U.S., you have to have two jobs--one to pay the mortgage, and one to pay for health care." How charmingly naive. I've met people working three jobs in Philly who have neither a mortgage nor health care.

Capitalism is a brutal system. It works best in countries where the government recognizes it must either tame--or be tamed by--the inherent excesses of capitalism. The nanny states derided in the U.S. seem to have managed that balance far better than the "land of the free"--where I was often reminded that "freedom isn't free." No, indeed, the price is very high.
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