Think About It. Middle Class. Are you? Were you? Will you be? Do you want to be? Do you even know what it is? Does it exist or is it simply an imaginary figment of social commentators with too much time on their fertile minds? Many bemoan the fact that it’s disappearing. The subject seems to have become an obsession with the news media and authors (pejoratively called the “coastal elites, especially by those not educated in Eastern schools of journalism). In what was once called a “classless society”, how did we become preoccupied with the subject? Maybe what is really meant by some is that some others just “ain’t got no class”. And it is about others isn’t it? For Nancy Isenberg the “others” are White Trash, which the proud PHD Professor of History describes in less than 500 pages. How then can I define Middle Class in the Sage self-imposed limit of 500 words or less?
While Isenberg finds ample evidence of commoners being put in their dreadful place, I could discover no use of the term “middle class” until 1745 when James Bradshaw outlined a Scheme to prevent running Irish Wools to France. The term itself has had a variety of meanings. When there was no expression for a person who was neither nobility nor peasantry in early modern Europe, our coveted “middle class” was inserted. Another version was capitalists with so much money they could rival nobles. And now? Does class relate to money, education, historical position, state of mind or?
Currently Africa dominates the talk as candidate for an increased middle class. Seems odd, since the number of nations and the size of the continent make conclusion difficult. Worldwide financial markers differ widely. For Africa the honor falls as a group to people with a minimum of anything from 2 to 10 dollars expenditure per day. In the United States the cost of class is a little more like $30,000 to $100,000 per year. Even with this wide disparity it is predicted that by 2030 80% of middle classes will come from the global South, but only 2% from sub-Saharan Africa,
In a recent Kendalltuckians Unite Facebook entry, John Carter posted “ Having recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, I reflected on the fact that while growing up in Kendallville, I was aware of poor whites on the south side, but that they were largely invisible to me and, I suspect, to the larger community.” Carter goes on to include a page from Terry Housholder’s 150 Years in Kendallville, 1863-2013. Seems former coal miners came from southeastern Kentucky “to find jobs, a better life”.
I admit I lived there in the early ‘60s when the folks from “sunnyside” did seem to speak a slightly different language as they trekked to the nearby foundries. However the dentist’s wife in our little group considered us “the cream of the crop”. Since we no longer have the “landed gentry”, I wonder if that made us elite or simply Middle Class. Think About It.