On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 5:38:15 PM UTC-4, A Friend wrote:
> danny burstein wrote:
>
> > [twitter]
> > Ben Ehrenreich
> > @BenEhrenreich
> > Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September 1,
> > a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go.
> > She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory
> > by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.
> >
> >
https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1565753750752575493
> I'm sorry, danny.
Um, I made that mistake too, for a couple of seconds - and then I read it again.
But I'm sorry to hear it. (I just heard from the PBS NewsHour.)
I met her some years ago, when she was reading from her book: "Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything."
I remember that she said: "if there is a god, he is not a benevolent god."
And her books are great. She was likely best known for her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America."
https://www.southingtonschools.org/uploaded/faculty/bhosmer@southingtonschoolsorg/English/summer_reading_2020/Grade_12/Grade_12_-_AP_Language_Required_Text-Nickel_and_Dimed_by_Barbara_Ehrenreich.pdf
From the back cover:
"Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job - any job - could be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered as a woefully inexperienced homemaker returning to the workforce. So began a grueling, hair raising, and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly 'unskilled,' that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors."
From the introduction:
"If there were other, subtler things different about me, no one ever pointed them out.
Certainly I made no effort to play a role or fit into some imaginative stereotype of
low-wage working women. I wore my usual clothes, wherever ordinary clothes were
permitted, and my usual hairstyle and makeup. In conversations with coworkers, I talked
about my real children, marital status, and relationships; there was no reason to invent a
whole new life. I did modify my vocabulary, however, in one respect: at least when I was
new at a job and worried about seeming brash or disrespectful, I censored the profanities
that are - thanks largely to the Teamster influence - part of my normal speech. Other than
that, I joked and teased, offered opinions, speculations, and, incidentally, a great deal of
health-related advice, exactly as I would do in any other setting.
"Several times since completing this project I have been asked by acquaintances whether
the people I worked with couldn't, uh, TELL - the supposition being that an educated person
is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones. I
wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in
some enviable way - more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most.
But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me 'special'
was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more
homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less
likely to be funny or bright. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought
to broaden their circle of friends."
And, from her 1989 essay "Drug Frenzy" (in the book "The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed":
"Alcohol is the drug that undid my parents. When my own children reached the age of
exploration, I said all the usual things like 'no.' I further told them that reality, if carefully
attended to, is more exotic than its chemically induced variations. But I also said that, if
they still felt they had to get involved with a drug, I'd rather it was pot than Bud."
(This is even more poignant when you read, in her introduction to that book, that she describes her father, before he developed Alzheimer's, as "the smartest man on earth." In Wikipedia, it says (his name was Ben Howes Alexander): "Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana School of Mines (renamed Montana Technological University since 2018), and then to Carnegie Mellon University. He eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation.")
That same essay was reprinted in the 1990 book "War on Drugs: Opposing Viewpoints."
If you like, here's more on her father (from the 1980s):
"One of the first questions in a test of mental competency is 'Who is the president of the United States?' Even deep into the indignities of Alzheimer's disease, my father always did well on that one. His blue eyes would widen incredulously, surprised at the neurologist's ignorance, then he would snort in majestic indignation, 'Reagan, that dumb son of a bitch.' It seemed to me a good deal — two people tested for the price of one."