The NYTimes finishes its series on class with a piece on a single mother's rise to the middle class, through perserverance, marriage, and some luck. Now she is a registered nurse, mother, wife, and the star of her network. (The piece is reminiscent of Jason DeParle's recent book on welfare reform, though the most successful of his three featured women has yet to marry, she does have a stable relationship with a man.)
Angela Whitiker's Climb - New York Times: "But she has found herself alone. She is making more money than anybody she knows. And come payday, everybody needs something, and not just the kids. Relatives need gas money, friends could use help with the rent. Even her patients, on hard times themselves, have their hands out."
It's a familiar story--all the young star athletes with their homeys, the actors with their entourages (there's even a TV show now showing that). It seems that one aid to success is moving--if you can get away from the old and familiar it's easier both to form new habits needed for success and avoid drains from the demands of the old life. I'm reminded of "Trainspotting", the movie on British drug addicts in which the "hero" betrays his friends as a prerequisite to going straight. Is that one reason why black immigrants are doing better in the U.S. than the native African-Americans? There's a difference between the networks that immigrants have where they help each other up (some Koreans have savings clubs where each member contributes regularly and the total sum goes to a member for investment in a venture) and the network with the people back home. In the latter case, it's almost a tax on success. It's another type of survivor's guilt--the contrast between two lives that really aren't that different in merit means the star feels guilty and the not-star feels entitled.
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