I am (almost) the 1%

Note: As sometimes happens when privileged white people try to write about class issues, it’s entirely possible I’m offending people here. If so, I apologize sincerely. If you take issue with anything I’ve written here, I’d appreciate knowing what and why so I can correct it in future discussions and thoughts that I have.

On a political level, I’m 100% behind Occupy Wall Street. I flip back and forth between being an anarchist depending on the day, but even old liberal me knows that the level of class inequality and lack of opportunity in this country have gotten absurd. I’m angry at Wall Street, especially the few on it who consciously steered us in this direction knowing they’d be bailed out if their gambles didn’t pay off (looking at you, Goldman Sachs). I’m angry at our government for not doing anything to stop them (not that I expected better). I’m angry at the absurdity of the debate over repealing the Bush tax cuts. I’m angry because of the number of good, intelligent, hardworking people I know who are stuck working dead-end jobs for next to nothing just to pay the bills.

On a personal level, it’s harder for me to pin down my feelings about Occupy Wall Street. As the movement has encouraged people to come forward and share stories under the theme “We Are the 99%”, I’ve taken a look at my own circumstances in life. Technically, I am part of the 99%. My family doesn’t rake in millions of dollars a year, I don’t have a trust fund, and I will have to work a real job in the real world to support myself once I get out of college. But that’s where my similarities with most of the 99% end. I will graduate from a good, private university next year with no debt and no student loans. That simple fact sets me apart from so many of the protest signs I’ve seen, from people who graduated with thousands in debt and nothing to show for it. It sets me even further apart from those who never had the means or the opportunity to go to college. And I’m just talking in the US. If you want to go global, in a world where a billion people survive on a dollar a day or less, I am the 1%.

The fact that my life has been extraordinarily privileged doesn’t stop me from worrying about the economy. After my dad told me and my brother that it would be a good idea to invest our life savings in the stock market in April of 2007, part of me was terrified to watch my money evaporate into thin air as bank after bank failed or got restructured. Another part of me knew that if seventeen-year-old me had $3000 to invest in the stock market, with reasonable certainty that I wouldn’t need to touch that money for ten or so years, I had nothing to worry about.

This pattern intensified once I got to college. Freshman year, I worked 15-20 hour weeks at Safeway for much of spring semester, while I had two smaller jobs back on campus. I’m still not exactly sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think it was equal parts terror and guilt. Watching capitalism nearly collapse when I was coming of age made a powerful impression on me, and I’m guessing the effects of the financial crash will be with me my whole life. I saw gas prices rising, friends’ parents being laid off and my wages staying flat. More than anything, I saw that doing everything right—having a college degree, acquiring useful skills, building a career—didn’t guarantee you stability, much less prosperity. I saw how thin the line between success and destitution can be. And I saw that in spite of my family’s fortunate circumstances, I couldn’t count on their success to carry me through life. I’d always wanted to make my own way in the world, but for the first time, I felt that the safety net provided by my family might be more illusory than I’d ever thought possible. So I resolved to work as much as I could to save money in case I needed it.

The guilt part fed off of this. I would talk to friends at college, and so many of them would mention their financial aid packages, the loans they had to take out, the work-study jobs they had to have. I didn’t. I not only had parents who could afford to foot the bill, but almost half of my tuition covered by merit scholarships (which I’ve become increasingly convinced are not too far from a form of upward wealth redistribution). And while making money was certainly my main motivation for working so much, part of me wanted to know what it’s like to try to go to college full time while having an actual job, not one of the cushy campus ones where you water the plants in the science building.

Here’s (shockingly) what I found out: it’s hard. You consider not taking certain classes because they’d interfere with your ability to be available in the evenings for work. You tell your manager that you absolutely cannot work more than 15 hours a week, and you get scheduled for 24 one week and told that there’s nothing else they can do because someone just quit. You try not to let your profs know that you’re working, try not to use it as an excuse. You have to be incredibly on top of all of your homework, because you need to request days off two weeks in advance and if you forget, you end up getting off work at 11pm when you have a test at 8am the next morning that you still need to study for. You skip meals because you work 4-9 shifts, campus dining halls only serve from 5-9, and you don’t want to spend the extra money to buy dinner when you’ve already paid $2600 for a meal plan. You work 9am-6pm shifts and come home so exhausted from standing on your feet all day and so stressed thinking about all the work you didn’t do that you just want to sit on your bed and cry. You choose between working weeknights and worrying about homework you barely have time to finish or working weekends and having to turn down invitations to parties because you work the 6am shift on Saturday morning. And for all of this, you get paid $8.67 an hour, which works out to $8 after taxes. And then you pay union dues ($50 a month). Last semester, I calculated what happens if you’re trying to pay for college. To pay one semester of Whitman tuition with a minimum-wage job (assuming you pay no taxes or union dues), you would have to work 55 40-hour workweeks. In other words, you could work at Safeway full time for a year and still be about a thousand dollars short of one semester of college tuition.

I don’t mean to suggest that my experience was miserable. I was bolstered considerably by having $100-150 in extra spending money per week, and for me, work was more of a sociological experiment than anyone else. I loved talking to people, hearing their life stories, seeing who bought what and why. Mostly, work was a daily reminder of just how privileged I am. I had coworkers dealing with far more absurd schooling situations than me—people going to full time night school at the local community college while regularly putting in 25 and 30 hour weeks. Walla Walla isn’t exactly a wealthy area, and I would estimate about a quarter of my customers were on food stamps. I learned most of what I know about food politics and realistic food choices for people living in poverty during my year and a half standing behind a checkstand, and for that, I am eternally grateful to everyone who came through my line. And during this time, I was constantly hyper-aware of class—my own privilege, my guilt, and the relative and absolute poverty that so many people I interacted with lived in.

Perhaps most interesting were my interactions with other Whitman students. Some would come in chatting with friends about certain classes or profs, and I would often chime in. More often than not, the students would do a double-take, during which I imagine they had to re-program their brain to conceive of the possibility of a Whitman student working a minimum-wage job off campus. I imagine many of them assumed that this was something I had to do to afford college, and perhaps some of them felt uncomfortable being reminded of the fact that not everyone is as fortunate as they are. I had similar experiences when Whitties would come in and pay for their food with food stamps—I had to remind myself that it’s possible to go to a good liberal arts school and not be able to afford to eat. It sounds stupidly obvious now, but there’s a big difference between knowing something intellectually and seeing it right in front of you.

So now people are occupying all over the country, and most of them have personal stories of economic hardship. And when I read their handmade signs explaining why they’re out in the street, it feels like seeing Whitman students pay for their groceries with food stamps. These people are my community, and I agree with them completely. But we live in different worlds. They have student loans. I have $6000 invested in the stock market and no debt. Their houses are in foreclosure. My family owns our house outright, and it’s not exactly a small house.

I would still like to think I have more in common with “average Americans” (whatever that means) than the true 1%, the executives of giant corporations and high-profile Wall Street traders who rake in millions of dollars a year. In spite of all of my privilege, I don’t feel that I have a secure future. I have so little faith that the economy is going to start working for average people, and my post-grad job prospects seem like they’re going to rely on luck and chance as much as my own skills and ambitions. I feel like if anyone should feel secure, it’s me, and I can’t decide if that means that I’m just paranoid and unaware of just how privileged I am, or if it’s a sign of the depth of our economic problems. Neither option is really a good one.

Occupy Wall Street is also giving me a good reminder. Yes, I care about labor issues and economic inequality, but from my position of power, I’m not the best-qualified person to address these issues. Reading about the rules that have evolved around OWS General Assemblies, I was incredibly inspired. I love the idea that people moderate lines and underrepresented groups (women and people of color) get to go to the front because their voices need to be heard. I love the step up/step back idea, which encourages people who generally dominate conversations to give other people a chance to share. I want, more than anything right now, to come home from Ecuador for a few days just to get a chance to see what OWS actually looks like. But being this far away has also made me realize that I’m one of the voices that needs to step back. Rich white liberals have been going on about income inequality for years now, writing articles, citing statistics and doing interviews. It’s time to cut out the middleman and let the people speak for themselves.