The Little PEOPLE

Every time I let myself believe the Little PEOPLE are finally gaining some ground, I look again and see we aren't. I had real hope after the recent election. It felt like the new administration cared about the middle class, a middle class that had quietly stopped being the middle class under the people now on their way out.

Then it hit me where I actually stand. I'm part of the lower class now, though plenty of us used to call ourselves working class or middle class. We get by on Social Security and disability checks, money the government has already been dipping into to cover other bills, and we lean on places like The Master's Hand nearby for free food. And around here, if you happen to have any farm income, that works against you, because they count it as income before you ever subtract what it cost to farm.

Give most of us a real chance and we'd put something back into the economy. We'd like a say in what the new administration does, too. Take Illinois: almost all of it voted the new way, except for the big crowded cities. So where does that leave our voice? Nobody bothered to campaign in our towns, and the feeling out here is that nobody ever stopped to hear what worries us. Does any of this sound familiar where you live? I keep wondering how many other corners of the country are stuck the same way.

And who speaks for the forgotten ones anyway? On the very network that cheered this administration into office, people like us don't show up. They keep handing the microphone to experts whose feet never touched real hardship, or whose memory of it is so old and so distant that it stopped meaning anything to them.

There's also this pressure on those experts, the women especially, to match a standard that has nothing to do with how regular people live or how most men are judged. Some of us enjoy looking young and keeping that glow, sure, but that isn't what the average face looks like, and you can plainly see the bar sits lower for the men than it does for the women.

Watch the women experts on that network and half of them look dressed for a cocktail party rather than a day of work. The men are turned out well and appropriately, no argument there, but they aren't fighting the same uphill battle to come across as polished, youthful and lovely all at once.

When does our turn come? We're the ones in worn-out clothes, in hand-me-downs, or in what passes for fancy off the Wal-Mart rack, usually stitched together overseas. We have plenty to say and almost nothing we can do except endure. Welfare tends to skip right past us. Our Social Security and retirement checks hold flat while the price of living climbs, so each year we scrape by on a little less, with next to no one in government or society speaking up for us or lending a hand.

Still, the Little PEOPLE have earned a few things worth saying. Experience taught us. We hold our own philosophical conversations around the kitchen table. We notice things that the comfortable and the powerful tend to miss entirely.

How we live surely says something about the kind of life we ought to be building for everybody. The pattern I keep seeing is that the better off people get, the more they look down on the ones who didn't climb, writing off their opinions as worthless and their drive as nonexistent. Others who've done well fall into the same habit and treat struggling folks as a punchline. Count the Little People you spot in certain churches, or in a club like the Elks. That tells you enough.

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