I wasn’t able to open the article, but my father was born about as poor as one can be - money wise. As he likes to say, there was a good deal of love in the family, but not much money. (His father had diabetes that seems to have pretty much disabled him from being able to work.) He was raised basically in a log cabin in the 1940s and 50s, as the house was hand built by his grandfather in rural Oregon. There was an outhouse out back as they didn’t have running water, or electricity till he reached middle school if I remember correctly.
Dad has done pretty well for himself, having risen through the corporate ranks and then later started his own business which did well. I think that mobility in the classes is what makes America special. It’s why foreigners want to come here. It’s an America dream, as my father has said he didn’t want to be poor like his parents. He worked hard, took risks and as a result was able to lift himself and family out of poverty.
Got a chuckle out of this article on the reoccurring speeches at the conventions of growing up poor. Seems many politicians making speeches at the conventions like to give the impression they are the next Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin.
“In Defense of the Poverty Narrative”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/09/05/in-defense-of-the-poverty-narrative-convention-speeches/
snippet from Jonathan Tobin’s article:
"By the end of the first night of the Democratic National Convention, many journalists and others watching these festivities and last week?s Republican jamboree had had enough. From both left and right there came a bipartisan consensus of kibitzers crying out for a halt to the endless stream of narratives about impoverished or difficult upbringings overcome by hard work and all the other all-American virtues that lead to success. Many a commentator noted that if they had to listen to one more sob story about growing up poor they would scream. Others facetiously promised that after the binge of Horatio Alger tales that they had been subjected to, they would support any candidate, whether liberal or conservative, who would avow they were born to privilege and had squandered a fortune due to laziness and indifference.
.These understandable sentiments are the inevitable product of the repetitious nature of the speeches being aired at both conventions. Though Republicans and Democrats disagree on a great deal they all seem desperate to convince us they were born in the moral equivalent of a log cabin and that their emergence from their humble beginnings entitles them to our admiration as well as our votes. But as tiresome as this rhetorical feedback loop may be, we ought not to complain too much about it. The reason why politicians feel the need to say these things and why, despite our grousing about it, so many of us long to hear it, is rooted in our national identity. Social mobility is not, despite the efforts of some on the left to disparage the notion, a myth. It is at the core of what means to be American and though we may laugh about it, it is vital that we continue to celebrate it…"
