Nickel and Dimed:
The Myth of the American Dream

A sermon Offered by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, February 4, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

I was taught to believe.  I was taught to believe in two kinds of people.  There were people like us, and then, there were people like them.  Our America came from humble backgrounds, but we worked hard, we pulled ourselves up from the bootstraps, and we had money because we deserved it.  The other America—“Kmart People,” my father called them, although I could never figure out why, because we shopped at Kmart all the time.  The other America came from humble backgrounds, but they were lazy, they didn’t want to work.  They had no money, no class, because they hadn’t earned their part in the American Dream.

It has taken me years to disbelieve.  It has taken me years to disbelieve the myth of meritocracy. 

And, it has taken me years to believe that America has been built, not on a government of the people and for the people, but on the overburdened backs of the working class.

It has taken me years to believe that America has been built, not for the huddled masses yearning to breath free, not even for the muddled middle classes yearning to breathe carefree. 

I now believe the undisputable.  I believe that on this Sunday morning, 12.6 percent of all Americans—over 37 million people—live below the poverty line, which for a family of four means they living on less than $20,000 a year.  Most of these people are currently working, but, because of low wages, they are prevented from lifting themselves up.  The underemployed we call them.  I could tell you that if we factor in realistic housing costs and geographic cost of living considerations, which the government refuses to do, then the numbers shift, and some estimates say 79.4 million, or one-third of all Americans, live in poverty. (Celine-Marie Pascale, “Normalizing Poverty” from Experiencing Race, Class and Gender in the United States, 3rd Edition, edited by Virginia Cyrus, p. 352)

Barbara Ehrenreich in her acclaimed expose, Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America writes: “Americans of the newspaper-reading professional middle class are used to thinking of poverty as a consequence of unemployment.” (p. 219)  And yet, “according to the U. S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.” (p. 219)

Who are these people, the people pushed so far from prosperity?  First, and foremost, they are people, and we must not forget that.  Most are employed in the service industry. They work minimum wage or low wage jobs, renting us our Friday night DVDs at Blockbuster Video, serving us our Big Mac and Fries at MacDonald’s.  Some sell us our clothes at Wal-mart or the Gap. Some are like Alberto and Luis, who—just this Wednesday, in 23 degrees of windy winter weather—stood outside and dried my car at the car wash in Wilmington. Who are these people?  Some of them are named Tamika and Maria and Carla, and they clean our houses because we think our time is too valuable and we get them for a price that seems a bargain.  Some care for our aging parents. Some change the sheets at the motels we stay in.  Some of them are members of our family, or our friends.  Some of them are us, members of this very congregation.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes: “The majority of American workers, about 60% percent, earn less than $14.00 dollars an hour.  Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized childcare, subsidized housing, and effective public transportation.  But the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves—facing market-based rents, . . . on their wages alone.  For millions of Americans, that $10—or even $8 or $6—hourly wage is all there is.” (p. 214)

In one small southern city with a low cost of living, at minimum wage, a worker would need to work 88 hours a week to afford an efficiency apartment.  What if that worker had a child?  What if the child needed daycare or healthcare?  

In that same city, a single working mom—with an infant and a pre-schooler, would need to work at $16.34 an hour for 40 hours a week to be self-sufficient.  The minimum wage is $5.15/hr.  The new minimum wage, if it is passed by Congress, will be $7.15.  That won’t come close to permitting this single mom to be self-sufficient.  (statistics from “Voices for Virginia’s Children”)

As Unitarian Universalists, we say we believe in the worth and dignity of all people.  It is the first principle of our faith.  How valued are these lives at a time when “the income of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 is 150 times the wages of the average worker in his business.” (Virginia Cyrus, Experiencing Race, Class and Gender in the United States, p. 315)  How valued are the least among us when the average Chief Executive earns 821 times what a minimum wage worker earns? (statistic from The Economic Policy Institute)

According to economist Timothy Smeeding, “America has the most [economic] inequality of any modern nation. . . . not only has the gap between the highest and lowest earners been greater than in any other industrial country, but . . . policies that redistribute income have also been the weakest.  As a result, America’s poorest are . . . poorer than people in a comparable position in most European countries.” (Moberg, p. 339)

When did it happen?  When did we learn that in American some people are worth more than others? 

Consider, if you will, the true story of Heather, a second grader.  Eyes downcast, Heather sits, alone, “at a desk pushed out into the school hallway. The children passing by say that they are not allowed to speak to her, and she is not allowed to speak to anyone else.”  What has she done to be pushed into the hallway as an outcast? Her teacher answers: “This child just does not know the difference between right and wrong—she absolutely does not belong in a normal classroom with normal children”  . . . look at her, will you, “awkwardly slipping in her flip-flops three sizes too big for her.  It is the middle of a cold snowy December, and she is dressed in a summer blouse several sizes too small and a long flimsy skirt.”   “I’ve given up on this child,” says her teacher, “she’s socially dysfunctional—three times now we’ve caught her stealing lunches and storing them in her desk to take home!”   Stealing lunches to take home; summer clothes in the winter.  This child—“literally half-starved for food”—this child—silenced and unseen by the system around her—this child has been left behind. (Adapted and quoted from Rickie Solinger, “Caught in the Poverty Trap” from Experiencing Class, Race, and Gender in the United States, p. 386)

Historian and social agitator Howard Zinn writes: “The success and failure of the United States of America lies in [these] stories.  We have a class system . . . in a country that promises “liberty and justice for all.”  It is a three part class system: “A class of extremely rich people; another class of quite prosperous [middle class] people ([who are very] nervous about the security of their situation); [and a third] class of men, women, and children living in desperation and misery within sight of colossal wealth. (Howard Zinn, Passionate Declarations, p. 148)

When did it happen?  When did we learn that some people’s labor—the work of their lives—was worth more than other people’s labor?  When did ranking people become the American way?

Ranking and rating people has been one this continent since the first vestiges of a ancient European class system crossed the Atlantic to put down roots in this New World.  And it took solidified hold in 1787, when the Founding Forebears of this nation drafted our Constitution.  Because that “Constitution was designed to keep the distribution of wealth pretty much as it existed at the time—which was [grossly] unequal.” (Zinn, p. 151)  And our new government’s power was used to suppress any attempt to change that.  Howard Zinn writes: “The new Constitution of the United States was drafted by fifty-five men who were mostly wealthy slave owners, lawyers, merchants, bondholders, and men of property.” (p. 151) These crafters of our country were guided by the elitist economic philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, who wrote: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.  The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of people.”  Controlling the masses was key to the thinking of these Founding Fathers, who said, “Give therefore to the [rich and well-born] a distinct permanent share in the government.”  From that place, they would be able to control an expected class conflict, which would come from [and I quote James Madison] the “unequal distribution of property.”   Today, two hundred and twenty years later, our United States senate, which approves our economic policies, is 2/3 millionaires.  (Gregory Mantsios, “Media Magic: Making Class Invisible” from Race, Class and Gender in the United States, p. 413)  As Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Capitalism forgets that life is social.”

Suzanne Pharr, a lesbian feminist theorist and community organizer, says: “In order for this top-heavy system of economic inequity to maintain itself, the 90 percent on the bottom must keep supplying cheap labor.  A . . . complex . . . system of institutionalized oppressions is necessary to maintain the status quo so that the vast majority will not demand its fair share of the wealth . . . and bring the system down . . . [so] we see women performing unpaid labor in the home or filling low-paid jobs, and we see people of color in the lowest-paid jobs available.  The method is complex: limit educational and training opportunities for women and for people of color [and lower class white males] and then withhold adequate paying jobs with the excuse that [those kind of people] are incapable of filling them.  Blame the economic victim and keep the victim’s self-esteem low through invisibility and distortion in the media.”  (Pharr, p. 482-3)  Victoria Spinks has felt this, lived this, as she wrote in our first reading: “It’s like the world has a negative image of us, so we absorb that image. . . feeling something’s wrong with you because you . . . are poor.”

People are poor, but most people are poor because we choose to compensate them poorly.  Most people are poor because we choose to keep them poor. Most people are poor because we need to keep them poor to maintain our own comfort, to fund our own lifestyle, to sustain our own need to be served.

But we, the served, can wake up from this immoral American nightmare. Contrary to what we may believe, history does not repeat itself.  History renews itself—it renews itself through the choices we make.  In the words of the great pillar of the labor movement, A. Philip Randolph, if we choose, we can become “the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

The first thing we can do is better educate ourselves on this state of emergency.  An easy yet illuminating first step is to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.  You will not be the same when you are finished.  And if you’ve already read it, thank you, and now take another step, and read another book that goes even deeper into this, our national tragedy.

What else can we do as a Unitarian Universalist people of faith to challenge these savage inequalities?   We can do more than write checks.  We can do more than writes checks to charity.  We can do more than volunteer to put band-aids on the needy.  Charity, generosity, is necessary, and I don’t mean to belittle it, but more essential is our work to alter the system that perpetuates the need for us to be charitable.

Barbara Ehrenreich is clear: “What we can do to help hardworking people trapped in poverty is fight for increasing social benefits, universal health insurance, and a universal child-care subsidy.  We can demand that cities build affordable housing rather than demolishing it or gentrifying it. [We can] tell the courts to get serious about enforcing the law against firing people for union activity . . . [We can] join the living-wage movement, which is using whatever leverage it has to convince individual cities to raise wages. (The Sun, January 2003, p. 10)

Howard Zinn writes: “Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment . . . but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society . . . small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress.”  (A Power Government Cannot Suppress, p. 270)

I dream of us being a congregation of change makers; I dream of us being a congregation of conscience; I dream of us being a congregation stirred to action.

I believe that a moral revolution for the worth and dignity of all people can begin in churches like ours. I believe that a moral revolution for a just economic community can begin with our hands, our hearts, and our heads.  I believe it is our religious imperative to recast and reshape the American Dream.

May it be so.  Blessed Be.  Amen.

©Copyright 2007 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.