Barbara Ehrenreich: When someone works for less pay than she can live...

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Barbara Ehrenreich

patriotic war peace

The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

Barbara Ehrenreich

our-society poor facts

The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to come from other Americans.

Barbara Ehrenreich

oil military war

Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, "Adoption, not Abortion," although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.

Barbara Ehrenreich

abortion adoption atheism

There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

Barbara Ehrenreich

positive-thinking differences thinking

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.

Barbara Ehrenreich

debt chance hands

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

Barbara Ehrenreich

punishment struggle sky

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Barbara Ehrenreich

poverty motivation character

a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class. ... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune?

Barbara Ehrenreich

retail class thinking

Marriage is socialism among two people.

Barbara Ehrenreich

eugenics marriage two

It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.

Barbara Ehrenreich

narcissistic results men

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

Barbara Ehrenreich

offering should-have ideas

Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.

Barbara Ehrenreich

distance class war

Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

Barbara Ehrenreich

endure absence doe

Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding--and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.

Barbara Ehrenreich

philosophy mean children

We [on the left] have to be used to being a minority -- a small minority -- for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right, even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror-image delusions.

Barbara Ehrenreich

mirrors running thinking

Call it 'nationalism' when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word 'patriotism' for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.

Barbara Ehrenreich

effort car country

Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm.

Barbara Ehrenreich

cancer scary dying

Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.

Barbara Ehrenreich

debt numbers america

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no - not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself. We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

Barbara Ehrenreich

feminism women military

When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.