Bootstrapped

Adult nonfiction 

     When I was quite young, after overhearing a conversation between adults at church coffee hour I asked my mother if we were lower, upper, or lower class.  Horrified, she told me that we were none of the above.  We were members of the intellectual class.  We were beyond those other distinctions.  

     Mom was a big believer in the meritocracy, the concept that whether we're talking high school newspaper editor or college president the cream rises to the top.  If you were talented, ambitious, and hard working you would succeed.  (She did at least know this would be harder for people of color).

      I believe that most of us were brought up with some version of the American dream embodied in the idea that any little boy can become president.  It rests on two coralary premises: that the successful deserve all the wealth they accumulate because they earned it and that the poor, being lazy or inferior, need a kick in the butt rather than a handout.  It embodies our nation's dysfunctional worship of and insistence on rugged individualism.

     Alissa Quart knows how to call bullshit.  In Bootstrapped:  Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream she shows it for what it is for all but the very wealthy:  the American nightmare.  

     One point Quart clearly makes is that the concept of the self made man (or woman) is pure, unadulterated bull crap.  For example she tears apart the rugged individual frontier myth popularized by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her Little House series.  The pioneers were beneficiaries of the government giving white people large pieces of land that had been stolen from the Indigenous Peoples.  She also shreds the Horatio Alger rags to riches of the past and the current girlboss fetish.

     Quart shows that all of us but the most obscenely rich and powerful are kept fragile and precarious by this myth with its go it solo demands.  Believing that the poor are not deserving and that money spent on them is wasted, we have a piss poor safety net.  We're the only industrial nation without national healthcare which leads to travesties such as GoFundMe as healthcare funder.  

     But Quart believes that a better nation is possible.  In her last chapters she talks about steps in the right direction such as worker coops and mutual aid societies.

     If you're scared shitless, as I am, by the growing abyss between the obscenely rich and powerful and the increasingly more poor and precarious rest of us and the desire of government (of, by, and for the wealthy) pushing to widen it, you owe it to yourself to read Bootstrapped and let it inspire you to action.

On a purrrsonal note, Eugene and I have lived all our child raising and beyond life in Graystone.  When we moved there ten days before Amber was born it was owned by a series of slumlords who squeezed all the money they could out of tenants while weaseling out of maintenance.  We had to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking because tap water featured fecal contamination.  One day we'd heard about a trailer park in Bangor being sold out from under its residents' feet.  With a dearth of affordable housing, a number of low income and medically fragile people were put in peril, especially those whose trailers couldn't be moved.  When we learned that Greystone was on the market some of us decided to fight back.  Partnering with Coastal Enterprises, we turned it into a cooperative.  We're not only safer, but much better off.  We have our own rules and elected officials.  Our maintenance is so much better because it's done by people who have skin in the game.  I suspect Quart would like this tale of a largely low income, blue collar crew refusing to be screwed.  We're talking over 60 units of affordable housing in a town with school choice.  (Jules)

And the cats and dogs are safer too.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to the others who made this happen in 2010 and Coastal Enterprises for collaborating with us.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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