April 3, 2008
YOU REALLY HAVE TO WORK AT STAYING POOR IN AMERICA:
Chasing the American Dream with $25: A fascinating new memoir challenges the notion that only dramatic government intervention can rescue the working poor. : a review of Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard (Evan Sparks, April 3, 2008, The American)
How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a book about it, titled Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true.In college, Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which argues that only government intervention can rescue the working poor from what Ehrenreich portrays as a desperate plight. Shepard doubted her thesis and wanted to test it. So after graduating, he went to Charleston, South Carolina, with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, $25, and a made-up tale of woe. He spent the first two months in a homeless shelter while he worked as a day laborer. He later found a permanent position with a moving company, which gave him a stable income. This allowed Shepard to buy a (very) used pickup truck, rent and furnish an apartment with a coworker, and start saving.
During this time, he was on a strict budget, buying clothes at Goodwill and lunching on peanut butter crackers and Vienna sausages. After ten months, he left Charleston due to an illness in his family. By that point, he had saved over $5,000. Along the way, he had met dozens of marginal citizens whose lives he found relentlessly fascinating.
The most revealing aspect of Ms Ehrenreich's book is that she makes herself a kind of lab rat in a secular statist experiment and demonstrates that if you are as atomized from the society around you as liberalism seeks to make you then life can indeed be difficult. But you pretty much have to embody every pathology of modernity.
OJ,
Don't you think Barbara Ehrenreich fully realized that staying atomized was the only way to keep the experiment going, and to help keep certain assumptions in place? Namely, the big time assumption that poorer people don't have support systems outside of what Big Government can provide? Heck, she mentioned in her own book what some folks do ("Always find a church."), but never expanded upon that.
Though I would love to know what Ms. Ehrenreich (or Mr. Shepard, for that matter) would think about the common practice in my part of the country of 10, 15, even 20, illegals living in one house so all can send some money back to the family in the home country.
Posted by: Brad S at April 3, 2008 9:49 AMWhen I worked in TX we stayed 4 -- including illegals -- to a Motel Six single so we could save money.
Posted by: oj at April 3, 2008 1:13 PMYOU REALLY HAVE TO WORK AT STAYING POOR IN AMERICA
Not really. You only need to wait for govt. handouts and refuse to work.
Posted by: ic at April 3, 2008 5:27 PM