Expat Angst: Why Occuppy Wall Street? Part 2...

...Or the 2,000,002nd Reason I Left!

"Bye Y'all"
painting by delorys welch-tyson

Let me pick up where I left off…


Now, when there are two paychecks in a household a family unit might develop an erroneously inflated sense of economic worth. Suddenly the family finds that they are paying outrageous prices for small, often unnecessary things. The traffic suddenly decides to bear surrealist prices for flotsam and jetsum: whether it’s a ten-buck cup of coffee or a one bedroom apartment facing an alleyway in Manhattan for $4,000,000. The family begins to believe they are entitled to things that no longer have the value they had in their parents’ generation. No one is going to sell you an overpriced house or apartment to you if you are unwilling to buy it. It’s quite simple really. It simply requires a collective American and realistic philosophy regarding what something is actually worth and why.

Where once, one could achieve a decent education for a moderate price at a State University or for free at a City University, now everyone is vying for an overpriced ivy league education in order to major in philosophy or basket weaving, then wonder why they can’t find employment when they graduate.

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Whose fault is this?

Perhaps one should look around, while occupying Wall Street, to see who really might be occupying their jobs if they can’t find they can’t land one in their chosen field.

I realize I’ve been absent from the United States for quite some time, but I remember that all of my professional service providers, whether they be lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, editors or bank employees were all college graduates. People with college degrees (usually some kind of liberal arts endeavor) who worked for retail establishments were all occupying temporary gigs until they could figure out what profession they would pursue. I’m assuming they were all American people. Of course I never checked their birth certificates…so who knows.

Perhaps I’ve just been gone too long. I have no idea what my American brethren are talking about, anymore.

**Perhaps I should just find a venue where they’re trending, to grow my knowledge of things going viral so that I can offer more transparency to my dissed homies!

**(See my blog post: Ugly Words and Jacked-Up Concepts)

Expat Angst: Why Occupy Wall Street?

Recently I received a letter from a male friend in response to a blog I wrote concerning the precarious state of the European Union. My friend, a native New Yorker, is an educator, activist and Fulbright scholar and has for decades lived on the West Coast, in the San Fancisco Bay area. Here is an excerpt from his correspondence:


“I'm not sure what steps concealed the deconstruction of the middle class in Europe, if there has been such a deconstruction; but I know this one for the US. First we added a second working adult to the definition of middle class - so that two incomes were needed to produce the lifestyle previously accomplished with one. Then we offset flattened salaries with housing inflation so that the middle class could maintain once again the same lifestyle by borrowing off of its housing. And we lowered the costs of most everyday products by having them made in places where people earn only a couple of bucks a day for their labor. All the time, the share of the assets owned by those at the top, whose tax burden we steadily reduced to the point of starving government.”

This is my response:

When I was growing up in a moderately middle class black American family in New York City, my parents and their peers lived with a particular philosophy.

Although, both of my parents worked, my mother remained a homemaker until the last of her children reached school age. There were three of us. Their philosophy was that in a family, the role of the father’s income was to determine the standard of living in a family; the wife’s income would contribute to the quality of life. You see, this way, if one were to loose his/her job, the other could be able to kick for the duration, with minimum and workable adjustments in its day-to -day standard of living requirements.

In addition, the philosophy was that a family should never purchase a home where both full salaries would be required in order to qualify for a mortgage. This would often mean that one have to live in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, Stanford, instead of Greenwich, Pasadena instead of Beverly Hills, Oakland instead of Sausalito, if you understand my meaning. This way, one wouldn’t accumulate unnecessary overhead, thus limiting the economical mobility of the family which the mother’s additional income could provide. The mother’s income was to be used primarily for quality of life issues such as planning for higher education for the children and also for the cultural enrichment of their intellectual and spiritual growth.

My family’s philosophy evolved in a culture… a black American culture… where historically both the female and the male worked outside the home for its survival. (Of course, I realize that I’m talking basically about my own family and their peers, not the general American community, black, white or other.)

When the American male ethnic majority, through their women’s coercive tactics, reluctantly gave into their demands for the right to work for economic compensation, no theory was put in place as to how this would work in order to maintain the financial equilibrium of a family unit.

A backlash then ensued which granted women unequal, inferior, pay for equal work and at the same time required that in order to achieve a decent standard of living it would be necessary to find access to more than one paycheck for each housing unit, in most areas of the United States..

Would you like me to continue?

Blaxpat Quote for November: Living Abroad

Some have said that, as a foreigner, it's difficult making friends abroad. This is what I tell them:

"The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don't need any fingers."
                                                                                                     ~ Larry Flynt


Alors...bon séjour!

The Occupy Wall Street Movement?

Being far, far away and all, in France, surrounded by EU madness, I am completely baffled by what this Wall Street Movement in the States is really about.

I’ve been wondering, though, if perhaps the brochure, from the Wall Street English Institute, below may be at the heart of the matter?

Really…they gave me this!

They claim that they are endorsed by Cambridge University!