In my class American Political Thought, Professor Sykes mentioned that a poll was taken about American political discourse to survey which political words we, as a people, tend to shy away from and just avoid utilizing. The top ranked phrase was "the state." We tend not to think of ourselves as so separate from our government, in that whole We The People kind of way.
The second most avoided word in American political discourse, our professor reported, is "class." My hand immediately shot up in protest. "I disagree. What about William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting, his cousin's New Deal, Hoffa and the labor movement, MLK's Poor People's Campaign, etc.?" We may not use the word itself in our discourse, but we are being less than honest with ourselves if we think that it has not informed a huge portion of our history.
We talk about class in moments of strife and inconvenience. The Great Depression. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The turmoil of the 1960s. We ask ourselves, just for a moment, how did we get here? What could have been done to prevent this? How are we going to treat each other as we move forward? Yet somehow we fall back into the same patterns. Executive pay keeps rising meteorically while wages for the rest of us stagnate. Fewer and fewer workers are joining unions and collectively bargaining for economic justice with their employers. The blue chip stocks are soaring to new highs while the blue-collar stores are going out of business in the face of globalized competition.
But precisely because we only talk about class in times of crises, we are not allowing ourselves the opportunities to avert them. Much like foreign policy, where a nation must work even more diligently in peacetime to avert war, we should resurrect the discussion of class and realize its place as a central theme in our American story. Last week I wrote about the concept of the American Dream. That is a story about class! The widespread commitment to equal opportunity in this country makes it more possible than in most places (though this is increasingly less true) to improve your class standing and be socially mobile. Don't tell me that we never talk about class!
Semantics aside, class is in the news. Many Americans are rightly outraged at the astronomical executive pay packages that have recently made headlines. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs received a $53.4 million bonus, smashing a record that was once previously held by our current Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson. Bob Nardelli of Home Depot received a severance package of $210 million. That is simply obscene, and I would argue, in contrast to those living without in our country, immoral. No one works that hard. And the people who come close to working that hard are still making $5.15 per hour. Congress, largely inhabited by multimillionaire plutocrats, is oh-so-generously working on kicking up our minimum wage to $7.25 per hour. But this does little to close the gap between the privileged and the proletariat.
The business community still finds it acceptable to lavish excessive amounts of compensation on executives while the workers under them struggle to make ends meet. Our money culture tells us that the pursuit of wealth is the most exalted. Students in and out of Kogod subscribe to this philosophy. We look up to the Blankfeins and Nardellis of the world as "leaders" and "captains of industry." Others are rightly ashamed to reside in such a sick society with such demented priorities.
Realize that this campus is part of a cycle. We usually hear the world "cycle" used in reference to a "vicious cycle of poverty" that eviscerates prospects of social mobility for low income families in our country. But privilege is a cycle, too. From legacy admissions, trust funds, college savings accounts, cars and even your parents' college education; these are all elements, among many, that are cobbled together to put you where you are today. Class is less about your fashion sense, your political leanings or how you conceive yourself but more about these bread-and-butter indicators of where you stand in the economic stratum.
Our system is based on the concept of scarcity. Therefore, the choices we make do not exist within a vacuum. On a personal level, my luxury purchase of an iPod or basketball sneakers may not have impoverished a fellow citizen, but these larger decisions that we collectively make about what constitutes a living wage, what rights workers are afforded, what kind of work force equality we pursue in our careers and what kind of healthcare and pensions are provided to the workers who humbly serve us do affect others.
We should stop talking about the minimum we can give the hardest workers in our country. We should start talking how and why we allow differences as vast as that between $210 million and $5.15 per hour. Until that gap is drastically lessened, I'll never stop talking about class. I hope you'll join the discussion.
Paul Perry is a senior in the School of International Service
and a liberal columnist for The Eagle.
