It was more by chance, and in fact by virtue of being stood up, that I attended a talk titled “Economic Boom! For Whom?” last Tuesday, but I can safely say that what I took away from the experience is worth at least as much as the piece of paper they are going to hand me next month.
The talk was given by Felice Yeskel, co-author of Economic Apartheid in America, first published in 2000 and updated last year. Yeskel ran the Stonewall Center here at UMass for 20 years, and is currently involved in two separate but related organizations, Class Action and United for a Fair Economy. As you might have guessed, the subject of the talk was the penultimate American taboo: class – specifically the widening gap between rich and poor.
Speaking of that taboo, the speaker who introduced Yeskel recounted a scene from the popular television show “Sex and the City,” as included in Yeskel’s book. While our society has learned to talk openly about sex, she notes that it will probably be a long time yet before we see the debut of “Class and the City,” even on cable. Indeed, in an episode of “Sex and the City” where the main characters ponder dating a man who earned less than them, one of the women immediately shuts the topic down. It’s bad taste to talk about money, she admonishes them. The exchange takes place while the women receive expensive manicures from Korean immigrants, who work literally down on their knees.
But if class is the penultimate taboo in this country, never to be spoken aloud in good company, then what to do to about getting rid of gross economic disparity is even more so, to the point of thought crime. This is probably why attendance at an event on the disgusting coincidence of misery and opulence was so low and even lower when you subtract non-students, or the handful of students who were required to attend for a class, in spite of the 13 academic sponsors. Who wants to hear about that on a Tuesday afternoon, especially when we all know there’s nothing we can do about it?
Yeskel was prepared for this, however. Her model of presentation-“What, so what, and now what?”-was straightforward, and left no room for the despair that so pervades this institution. First, to illustrate “what,” Yeskel had ten volunteers come to the front of the room, where ten chairs sat facing the audience. Asked to sit down, each took one chair: ten people, ten chairs. Simple, right? But for some strange reason, Yeskel pointed out, it stops being simple when we start talking about wealth.
To demonstrate how wealth is actually distributed in this country required some shifting of seats, and in the end, nine people were left fighting over three chairs, representing the 90 percent of the population that owns 30 percent of the wealth. The tenth person, representing the top 10 percent of the economy, got seven chairs to himself, or 70 percent of the wealth. He got to pull all his chairs close to him and make something of a bed for himself, while his right leg, representing an even smaller sector of the population, got several chairs to itself.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, nine people had somehow managed to pile onto three chairs. How did they feel? Yeskel asked them. Uncomfortable, they replied. Asked to identify the source of their discomfort, the people on the very bottom of the chair pointed to those sitting on top of them, the ones on top pointed to those they were sitting on, and some even pointed to themselves – anywhere except the young man lounging in the seven chairs across the room. He felt very comfortable, he said.
After the charade, Yeskel asked the audience how we were feeling. Desperate, depressed, angry, were some of the replies. Tentatively, I raised my hand and offered that I felt inspired. What a great way to illustrate the distribution of wealth! I was thinking.
I thought of my final Dean’s Book class the day before, where we completed a course on the book “The Working Poor” with a discussion on “What we can do” about poverty. The prevailing view seemed to be that inequality had been with us forever, had always been as severe as it is today, and that there was really nothing we could do about it. It was suggested that perhaps one day, when we’re in a position of power, like a corporate executive or a journalist at a powerful newspaper, we will be able to use that power to help those in need. No, we already are in a position of power, I was trying to explain.
Suffice it to say that the contrast with Felice Yeskel’s talk was astounding. Yeskel doesn’t ask what can be done – she answers by going out and doing it, and she urged us all to do the same. Because we can. Because it’s the only way things have ever gotten better in this country, and it really would take some time to list all the things we enjoy today because of the past struggles of everyday people, no more extraordinary than you or I. But it requires organizing with other people, regardless of your politics.
According to Yeskel, once you take the first step of getting involved with an organization that cares about the same issues you do, the rest will come naturally. If that sounds like faith, it is still a lot more grounded in reality than the institutionalized disempowerment that is the greatest and perhaps the only remaining barrier to progress in our time.
Mike Sances is a Collegian columnist.
