The Middle Class Hoax

Growing up in a middle-sized Texas town, as the son of an architect and a stay at home mom, I always considered myself middle class. We didn't eat out much, didn’t own a Mercedes or a Lexus, went camping for our vacations, and cut our own grass. Why would I have ever considered myself rich? In my mind, the rich were those with guitar shaped swimming pools, a chauffer to take them to and from their tennis lessons, and Maui Jim sunglasses. I was certainly not that, and I wasn’t begging on the streets, so I must have been middle class. That's what society told me, and it seemed reasonable to me. And had I never left the United States, I probably would never have changed my mind. But after living the last several years in rural Central America, my concept of the middle class has changed. My idea of what is normal has shifted.

Here in Nicarauga, I wake up every morning at 4:30, brush my teeth, and light up the firewood in order to cook my breakfast of rice and beans. After dressing and downing a cup of coffee, I wedge my machete between the bars on the frame of my bicycle, and pedal to a nearby farm where I work. Later in the afternoons, after the workday is over, I sit around and talk with my neighbors, go out to look for firewood, or wash my clothes on a concrete washboard and hope that the sun is out so that they will dry. I work six days a week, as does pretty much everyone here, and relax on Sundays. If my next door neighbor had a good week selling firewood in the market, we might splurge and go in together for a three liter coke to share between the five or six of us that live nearby. If it's payday and I'm feeling generous, I might blow 100 Cordobas (a little less than $4) on several tamales to share. But only if I'm feeling generous, because that's more than I make for a days worth of work. On Sundays, if I'm feeling restless, I might go to town with a friend to make my normal purchases of rice, beans, oil, tomatoes, onions, coffee, and sugar. It's nice to get out of the pueblo every once in a while. But if funds are tight, and he can't afford the 8 cordobas (30 cent) bus fare into town, I go by myself.  

Bicylces are a thing here in the countryside. In the village I live in, there are only a couple cars, and they are 80s or 90s model beat-to-hell pickups that are normally, more or less, mostly running. A few more people have motorcyles. They are the people with a little steadier or higher paying jobs. Normally school teachers, construction guys, or security guards. That leaves the rest of us to get around on bicycles and public transportation. And since no one sits around talking about the gnarly public bus they rode into town today, that leaves the focus on the bicycles. Instead of sitting around and talking about the new aluminum rims they put on their Honda, or the bumpin'  sound system they put in their Jeep Wrangler, a lot of my friends sit around and talk about the new additions to their bike. "Hey man, I just got this sweet aluminum handle bar post. It cost me 120 cordobas (4 dollars) but it looks great." "Dude, have you seen the new rims Luis just put on his bike? He must have been working a lot lately and have some extra cash." Personally, I'm pretty proud of my own bike. I took everything off, sanded down the frame, and painted it white (to match my skintone, obviously). I have blue aluminum handle bars and a blue aluminum seat post, and some awesome Shimano decals stuck on the frame. I obviously don't have any Shimano parts, cause those cost five times as much, but the decals looks great. Because of the white paint, we named it La Parmalat, after a Nicaraguan brand of milk. It's not the nicest bike in town, but it definitely gets me to work and back everyday. But man, I would love to put some aluminum rims on that baby.

Describing the ins and outs of daily life in that way almost makes it seem funny. Because I grew up in the "middle class," cooking my breakfast over a wood burning fire now seems like I'm back on a Boy Scouts campout. However, my bicycle and my rice and beans are not just part of a cute social experiment. They're not just part of a funny story about a gringo in rural Central America. This is how the majority of the world lives. Turns outs there's nothing in-the-middle about middle class America. On a global scale, the middle class American is one of the privileged few. Part of the high society. One of the wealthy.

A quick google of “world poverty” leads to a lot of graphs, figures, and articles. And none of them consider $50,000 a year as somewhere in the middle. A majority of the people around me here in Nicaragua make between $1,000 to $2,000 a year. Some less, some more. 3 billion people worldwide live on $2.50 a day or less. 80% of the world population lives on $10 a day or less, and in the vast majority of the world, the income differential between the rich and poor is widening. One fourth of the world lives without electricity. On gameday, Cowboys stadium consumes more electricity than the entire country of Liberia has the capacity to produce. In the U.S., 81% of the population owns a car. In Nicaragua only 6%, and in Nepal, ½%. 7% of the world has a college degree, and 22% of the world owns or shares a computer.

Now let’s talk about consumption. 1.8 billion people worldwide consume 20L of water per day. In the United Kingdom, the daily average water consumption is 150L, and in the United States the average consumption is 600L. In 2005, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 77% of the total private consumption of goods. All of Africa uses 3% of the world’s energy, and the U.S. consumes 19%. Americans spend more on Halloween than the entire world spends on malaria in a given year. In 2006, the world spent around $1.1 trillion on military expenditures, of which the U.S. accounted for $598 billion. That same year in the U.S., $58 billion was spent on education, and $52 billion on healthcare. Certainly says something about our priorities… The average American consumes as much energy as 6 Mexicans, 31 Indians, and 370 Ethiopians. In 2009, the average American consumed 260 lbs of meat. The average Nicaraguan consumed 55 lbs, and the average Bangladeshi consumed 9 lbs. In the entire year.  If we divided up the GDP of the entire world equally among all of its citizens, each person would receive $10,000 a year to live off of. Could you live off of $10,000 a year? Could your family of four live off of $40,000? If I made $10,000 a year here in Tepeyac, Nicaragua, I’d be the richest guy in town.

In order to change our world, we must first change our mindset. We must consider what life is like for people outside of our immediate family, our circle of friends, or our country. We are all humans, supposedly created equally, by the same God. Regardless of race, ethnicity, or the social class we are born into. We must see ourselves as a member of the global population, and not just as an American.

Maybe the average “middle class” American cannot easily dictate the spending habits of the U.S. government, but he can certainly change his own spending habits. If each American continues to consume 260 pounds of meat a year, 600L of water a day, and a vastly unproportional amount of the world’s energy, how can the Nicaraguan, the Indian, or the Ethiopian have access his fair share. We must start to live sustainably and reasonably. We must stop considering our incredibly over consumptive lifestyles as normal. It doesn’t take a Harvard economics graduate to know that if a small percentage of the world’s population consumes a vast majority of its resources, only a little bit is left over for the majority to live off of. If those with the lions share of the global power and privilege, aka the “middle class” of the first world, continue to take and consume everything it can get its hands on, the poverty and the wars caused by it will never be reduced. Unless we shift our understanding of what is normal, and readjust our actions accordingly, how can global poverty ever be reduced?

Several years ago, a movie entitled 12 Years a Slave was released, depicting the life of a free black man in the United States who was tricked and sold into slavery, living the next twelve years of his life as a slave. During his years as a slave, the man had several slaveowners, some worse than others. However one of the slaveowners he had was portrayed in the movie as "the good" slaveowner. He didn't beat or kill his slaves like others did, and he talked to them gently.  He even took them to church on Sundays, since he was a respectable, God-fearing man.

With several hundred years of hindsight, the contradiction is glaring. How can a slaveowner be good? It doesn't make much sense. Today, the logic of considering a slaveowner a holy and righteous person seems preposterous. Ignorant even. But at that time, during the first half of the 1800s, it seemed normal. Only with the benefit of hindsight are we able to see the ridiculousness of it. And let's not forget that it wasn't very long ago that public places were segregated by law, women were not considered intelligent enough to vote, and doctors prescribed cigarettes to help calm a patient’s nerves.

After watching this movie, the image of the good slaveowner kept me thinking. What will our generation be judged for one or two hundred years down the road? What is it that today we consider normal, will then be considered an appauling infrigment on human rights. It very well may be the ridiculous economic inequality of our world. The fact that we consider it normal that a small percentage of the world has 2500 square foot houses, two cars in the garage, and a pool, while a large percentage of the world lives in houses made of rusty sheet metal, thick black plastic, rotting planks of lumber, or mud. That we consider it normal that a small percentage of the world has great access to health care facilities employing well educated doctors, dentists, and surgeons, while the vast majority of the world waits for hours and hours in line at an extremely understaffed hospital with undertrained employees with very little medicine and few if any surgeons. That we consider it normal that the minimum wage in the United States needs to be $15 an hour to provide a decent living for each person, but the farmworker in Nicaragua can be paid $150 a month (the legal minimum wage), and be expected to provide a decent living for his family. That we consider it normal that a Nicaraguan doctor can expect to make $400 or $500 a month, but a U.S. doctor isn’t considered successful until he’s pushing seven figures.

We may not be able to change the world, but we have to change ourselves. We have to view ourselves in light of the global population, and not just in light of the U.S. population. We must care for our brother in Africa as much as we care for our brother in the U.S. We must consume less. We must see that our overconsumption comes at a price, and that is price is global poverty. We must learn to share our global resources. Because we are not the middle class. Our lifestyle is not normal. It was a hoax.  

"The rich man cannot enter the kingdom of joy not because he wants to be bad, but because he chooses to be blind." - Jesuit priest Anthony Demello

*Sources: www.globalissues.org, www.one.org, www.worldcentric.org, 100people.org, public.wsu.edu.