CLASS - And war

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Class and War

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Wednesday, October 31, 2001; Page A27

When the anthrax scare started, the authorities tested the big media people and those who worked for them. They tested the members of Congress and those who worked for them. Eventually, they got around to testing postal workers, but not in time to save two from death.

This was not by design. There was a mess inside our government. The FBI and the health agencies weren't working together very well. Nobody thought that anthrax could escape from sealed envelopes. It turns out there may have been more anthrax in the postal system than we thought. And, yes, everybody has a steep "learning curve" on this strange new horror.

But it should bother us that the postal workers ranked last in the treatment pecking order. We knew with absolute certainty that anthrax-tainted mail was passing through the postal system. We knew which post offices had handled the letters.

Postal workers are asking why the authorities were just a bit quicker in demanding answers and taking precautions when anthrax threatened those in higher-profile lines of work.

It's a question the rest of us should ponder too, because it forces us to confront the reality of class. That's a subject Americans like to avoid and that many push aside by claiming that merely to mention the problems of class is to engage in class warfare.

Yet we talk all the time about race and gender. There's good reason to worry about injustices committed in their names. But inequalities of class can be just as insidious and often compound the problems people face because of their race or gender.

While we've made progress since the 1960s on both race and gender, we have in many ways moved backward when it comes to class. From the early 1970s until the late 1990s, the income gap between the top and the bottom of our society steadily widened. The differentials related to people's education levels grew enormously.

It's true that we live in a very rich country. Low unemployment rates during the boom years helped those who had been down on their luck find jobs, and helped many others bargain up their wages. And, yes, we have a lot of upward mobility.

But because success seemed to be related to education and knowledge, it was easier for the educated and the knowledgeable to justify how well off they were. And it became easier for them to look down their noses at those who weren't doing quite as well -- or to ignore them altogether. Call this the respect gap. It is not an ideological shortcoming; upscale liberals and conservatives succumb to it.

The late historian Christopher Lasch referred to the problem of "educated insularity." The supposedly enlightened, he said, often engage in what is simply "a higher form of parochialism." They don't have a lot of curiosity about how the other half lives.

The 1980s also saw the rise of the cult of the entrepreneur. There's a lot to be said for entrepreneurship. But as we celebrated the heroic, risk-taking capitalist more and more, we celebrated less and less the day-to-day virtues of those who primarily depend on the steady and loyal exercise of their labor to make a living.

We barely notice how large a departure this is from our past. From the 1930s to at least the 1950s, for example, a dominant theme of the popular culture was the nobility of the common man, as the phrase went. This idea provided raw material for the movies of Frank Capra and the novels of John Steinbeck. Both celebrated democracy as a way of life. This translates into a rough equality of respect among us all -- including postal workers.

Don't get me wrong. I'm absolutely certain that anyone who had anything to do with the failures that may have led to the deaths of Joseph P. Curseen Jr. and Thomas L. Morris Jr. feels great regret. There were enough mishaps here that you don't need some elaborate social theory to explain why they died. And you can't envy those with the job of figuring out what to do about the anthrax threat.

But let's acknowledge that postal workers have good reason to wonder why they weren't at the top of anyone's priority list. We worried about those on the receiving end of the letters. We didn't seem to think a lot about the people who handled and delivered the letters. Nobody has anything against these good souls. Most of the time, we just act as if they aren't even there.

-- Anonymous, October 31, 2001


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