Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20141026 : comparemela.co

Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20141026

Somebody brought up you know the iphone with food stamps and what she said was i know i am not supposed to judge people for that. Somebody remind me why because im feeling a little judge enight and like i know this one. I fired off a response and didnt really think of it and i started to get a good response. Then i started to get a weird response and i got an incredible response and that i was on the front page of the huffington post. Russia called in israel called and i have a fan base in serbia which is interesting to me and then there was do you want to write a book and now im interviewed about that book. Host right, yeah. Here we are. Tell us a bit about that book. I mean about the essay. Why did you decide to give a thorough response to a relatively flippant comment that you have heard similar comments before. Guest i was at a and someone asked a question i thought i know the answer to this one and im incredibly worthy so i often wrote responses of that length. Maybe not quite that way. There was one but that one in particular for whatever reason i dont remember the original wording of the thing i was responding to but something about the wording made me think i can explain this and so i did. As much as i was capable of at 2 00 in the morning after a long shift, and not it was really a gut level yeah i know this one. Often i didnt give it nearly as much thought as people give me credit for. Host the essay like the book gives us a chore of the things that people are judged for, anything from diet to work ethic to lives and you got a lot of criticism. A lot of people thought how is this woman actually a low income person . She is so articulate. People started digging into your background. How did that come about because even the New York Times, they question your credibility. Guest yeah which is really interesting because in order to question the credibility of someone who says this is what port feels like you have to say you dont look for and to be able to say that you have to have an idea of what port looks like which is interesting to me. Working class folks near the minimum wage like a third of americans who dont look like anything. We look like everything and everybody because we are all over the place. So the criticism i think was more projection than it was anything because people wanted to be able to say poor looks like this other thing. Poor looks like that over there. Poor isnt skilled because we have an america talkers and if you are skilled you are going to be successful. Cracks dont exist in american that was really the genesis of most of the criticism and the backlash from people saying you are doing for them properly. That was strange for my parents who i didnt have those Family Resources. Hypothetically i didnt eventually be reconciled when my first daughter was born but in those years i didnt have the Family Resources and i didnt have a degree and i was working for Service Economy just like everybody else now. Is the fact that my childhood was more comfortable than many children being that i did not experience that in the Service Industry and mean that i dont understand what its like not fail to pay your bills . How many kirsti have to not be able to pay your bills before you can say this is my broad experience im allowed to stand up and say that . People asked me about the criticism a lot and i said i dont really think its criticism. Its a defense mechanism of being able to say you clearly, and i said in my title a lot of a lot of people grabbed on to that people grabbed on to that in a city made all the bad decisions and i like to say its kind of a mix of decision and blocked because if i had been in a position where i could cover for my mistakes like a lot of wealthy people can i never would have slipped to the bottom or if i had a spectacularly good looks i couldve made all the bad decisions i wanted and it would have mattered but if you dont have those things, given that the question and youre not equipped to make great decisio decisions. I mean i left home when i was 16 years old. How wonderful are the decisions of any 17yearold out on their own . I always laugh when people are like you just didnt do it properly. Okay ill tell you what think about yourself that 16. Now assume that you can do anything you want and you have no rules. How long do you think you would have done . Probably as well as i did. So the criticism is interesting to me because it tells you more about the person doing the criticizing than it does about you. I gave my welfare records to the nation. I gave them to the washington post. I gave an interview and i put my out on youtube. I do not have anything more to prove because all i ever said was a fax to work hard every day and never get anywhere. Thats a true statement whether or not i was a multimillionaire living in a condo or i never had a home in my life. Its hard to work all your life you never get anywhere no matter what you do. Host part of the problem is when people hear the poverty rate which has been set at 50 , last year was 14. 5, we tend to think its the same 15 of americans. We are cycling in and out of and only a small percentage of people are poor for the years where measuring. Guest seems like most people that are working class will be in poverty five or six times over the course of their life. It really depends. Did you lock into a good job or maybe your spouse is something awesome or maybe you got a taxfree date or your uncle died in lefty 20 grand. You can have those years and you can have bad years and they come and they go and thats what working class in america is. Host i want to read a part of your book that i think really captures what its about. What i can say for sure is that downward mobility is like quicksand. Once it grabs you they keep constraining options until it got you completely. I slid to the bottom for a mix of my own decisions and some seriously bad luck. I think thats true of most people are while it can seem like upward mobility is blocked the layer between lower middleclass and poor poor is horrifyingly porous from above. What does that conjure up for you because throughout the book it sounds like theres a level of anxiety that you feel about being in poverty, a level of fatigue and the constant fear that you are going to get below. Guest im so glad i came through. Host in hearing your own words back to you, what were you thinking when you wrote that . Guest i was thinking about the flood when i wrote that. When i was pregnant with my first child and we discovered we were pregnant and my husband decided to go back to school. We applied and the government to school. We were going to be living off of his stipend because with the g. I. Bill you get your books and tuition paid and they give you a living stipend which is dependent on the zip code of the school you are in. For us we were supposed to get somewhere between 12 and 1400 a month. It was enough to barely live on. We could make it through the semester. My daughter was due three weeks after that first semester and then the money never came. There was a paper works grew up somewhere. So every week to let go and asked if the stipend had come and they would say no come back next week. Eventually we both got jobs at burger king locally and picked up the craftiest apartment we could find because we thought it was temporary. Now we would see that huge check for the back bay and we would be able to put down a deposit on a decent apartment where we could live with our kids. The money just kept not showing up all semester long. He kept not showing up and we were living in this apartment. There was a summer storm and ohio. Those things are not kidding around. The drains were not properly maintained in the building and everything, we lived in the lowest apartment in the basement and everything we owned was pretty much destroyed in that flood. We had no money and we had no place to go so we went to the weekly motel right up from where we worked. We stayed there but they didnt have enough money to pay the rent on the motel and the rent on the apartment. Our landlord sued us for eviction on this apartment that was mold ridden because his version of taking care of the flood was to send someone in with a shop vac atop the windows open for a few days. If you have ever been in ohio in the late summer its not effective. There were some old 6 feet up on the wall so it was crazy. And that was what was in my he head, knowing that her baby was on the way and we had done everything right. We had done everything right. There was nothing we didnt do right. We went to school. We got jobs, and had an apartment. We were going to be moving forward and then there was this spring storm and all of that was gone and what we had was some of the baby stuff that we salvage when the last. That was what we had. Host you mentioned this earlier but one third of americans are a paycheck or broken car or sick child away from poverty. Your experience throughout the book i have to say and going into it on my skeptical reading a book where the person experiences supposed to represent a broader issue but you do a good job of saying this is what i saw but also balancing it with this is created for a particular reason. Its how our systems are so yes this is my particular experience but also a common one on many levels. Guest i like to say that im not representative, i am indicative because these are things that he will hear the variation of the flood from any poor person. Any time you talk to someone and say tell me anything that was totally out of your control the set you back by years and they will have one and it will be a flood. It will be a sick relative or the time that they got laid off. Itll be the time time they heard there back but everybody has more than one of them. And they are interchangeable. It doesnt matter. It doesnt matter which story you are talking about her which time because something happened and something is going to happen and something will always happen so its a question being poor or workingclass at this point because we have heard the word moving upwards. Its always knowing that something is going to happen. You just dont ever really know when and you dont know what its going to look like and you dont know how bad its going to be about one thing you can count on is that they are still going to take all the taxes out of your paycheck and something is going to happen. Host the quote i read also you mention bad decisions and bad luck. Bad decisions that you referred to throughout the book are Health Related like from smoking and drinking or other vices. You talk about having to deal with insurance after your car accident. Do you ever get worried about playing into that stereotype that poor people are doing it to themselves . Do you are candid about decisions that might not have been the best in the world. Guest i think for anybody to try to say that i am human and i have never made a bad decision in my life, im a saint and you should be appropriately grateful for my perseverance and steadfastness. Theres not a person in this world that has not made a mistake. The difference between rich people and poor people is that when we make mistakes we cannot cover them. Ecn acted on the street. That is because hes not addicted enough to get into a Weeklong Program or their slots for him. If you seem addicted to rich person, you dont because they get rehab or they take personal time and go to rehab. Their insurance covers it and they are in a place where they can stay as long as any to get healthy. Its not that we make different decisions, is that we can cover them in the same way. We pay for our decisions immediately and we do it in a way that rich people will never understand because they never know what it is that if you screw up it could be the ruin of you. Thats what having a christian means. That is what comfort and privilege are. Never having to feel that fear that this is the day you screw everything up because that one time you made a mistake. Reflectively have i always make good decisions . Absolutely not but i always made that decision that made sense to me at that time and i havent always had a good solution. I have made decisions drunk, not going to say that hasnt happened but who hasnt . How many marriages started from a drunk person. Of course its stereotype for anybody who holds that stereotype and wont get rid of that stereotype of those people im going to hear what im saying anyway so i dont worry about them. If you are determined to find something in my history that explains the entire American Economy and why so many people are trapped in it he were living in a world. Get your tinfoil hat out and put it on and tell me about all of it. Host theres one part, i want to read another part that made me think of what we are discussing today said its ridiculous to make the argument that people should be able to predict every possible downturn in their lives in advance. Poor people are not uniquely and throughout the book you talk about how there are superhuman expectations for lowincome people while simultaneously being treated like subhuman and that comes across a lot in work situations that you describe, minimumwage work generally. I think many people know the minimum wage has decreased in value by 30 . Not only is it a low number, its worth less than it once was and yet you are expected to lift yourself up from your bootstraps. Can you talk a bit about your Work Experience and how hard this was . Guest sure. To begin with i use the bootstrap metaphor because to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps you need to be able to levitate. Your hands arent going to be free to study that latter so essentially they are saying do the impossible and least unsafe way possible and if you can manage that then you are okay. At work we are interchangeable. We are told how interchangeable we are. The vast majority of Service Industries especially Large Companies not the momandpop so much that the Large Companies have software that tell you within 15 minutes how many people you have to have on staff. So we are told that they need to be in here at 12 to 15 00 and we dont know how long we are going to keep you. Thats as much as we can afford to have you back we might need you to stay until 5 00 or its totally possible you make it here and we may send you back on again. Our profit margin is so valuable that we need you to dictate and plan your life around our profit margin. In exchange for that we are going to give you as little as legally possible and not only that we are going to make it cumbersome and onerous. We are going to have you sign contracts if they wont get a second job because we might want you to come in at 7 00 p. M. That night. I have signed contracts like that. We will give you 20 hours a week am in no more because then we would have to pay health insurance. There are no benefits or sick days. You are contractually obligated to come in whenever we call you. You have a 20 minute window to get here and if you get a second job you are fired. But we are paying you stab 7. 25. They expect us to make that work and people expect us to not rage. I dont understand how youre going to put restrictions on somebody like that. People have working brains that can see how ridiculous the whole thing as and to dehumanize them and tell them ill cook you complain there are another 100 of you outside the door. None of you have any more value than anybody else. How many times any servers working america can tell you they have heard i have a stack of applications and mile high. We are not allowed to make mistakes. We are not allowed to have lives. We are not allowed to have plants and if we do we are punished for them are thinking outside of our clock, but thinking about what the profit margin is. But then if we dont do it then we are not engaging and we theyre not earning it and we dont want it that much. So you know, work is indicative of the rest of our lives. Its another place that we are unhuman. Not inhumane but on human. We are drones. That is what they do. You have to go and you have to be friendly and not only do you have to be polite and nice but you have to welcome people as the one to your home and you have to make them feel warm and welcome. No matter what kind of day you were having and no matter how the customer treats you. They have actually done studies that tell us that performing that kind of emotion actually does your ability to feel it. You start having to lose contact between what you feel and what you are thinking. When work literally stops us of our ability to feel joy for 7. 25 an hour. We talked about the minimum wage. Do you know how many people are working for 7. 35 or 7. 50 . Our races are nickels and dimes. We dont get 1 dollar raises and on top of that you mention it can be fired for the simplest reasons. Host theres a belief that if you are fired to get something wrong. Imagine being fired. I dont know but was you or someone you knew this at the paperwork was done. Guest i personally had to fire someone because she had another job and her other manager put out the schedule more than a day before the workweek started. She was a great employee. She was one of those people that are not like me. She was a sunshiny person and she was fantastic. She couldnt keep up the schedule. She had to make it an often enough. We didnt need her often enough where often enough for she was trains over time she came and it was like the first time she had been in the door and she was making no progress. I had to let her go. There was a woman who was raising her own child. She was on her own and i had to look at her and say sorry i cant help you feed your baby even though you are fantastic. Host clearly you are sympathetic to that that given everything is set up it was out of your hands. Guest you have these labor targets to hit as a manager. You are allowed a percentage of your sales i can go to labor and if you dont you lose your job. Ive managed a restaurant. I made 28,000, which is not nothing. If you are working and 90 hour week for 20,000 and youre desperate enough to do that can you afford to lose your job and can they afford to lose there is . Probably not because its probably the best job you have ever had. The mentally torturous job at 90 hours a week for 20,000 is the best job you have ever had he can afford to lose that. Then you have to do these things for people. You know exactly what is going to do to their lives and you understand all of that and you do it anyway because you have your own family to feed. Host given everything that you know about how hard it is to work, how you can get fired for anything out of that make you feel about these fast food worker strikes going on because it seems like a huge burden on the shoulders of people who are working incredibly hard and made their wages raise and yet they are pushing the movement themselves also at the risk of being fired. Host guest we do everything ourselves. Nobodys going to help us. Are you kidding me . Nobodys going to help us. More than that you watch these people walk out. They are going to lose their jobs. They are going to be retaliate

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