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Then, In The 1980's, Came The Paroxysm Of Downsizing, And The Very Nature Of The Corporation Was Thrown Into Doubt. In What Began Almost As A Fad And Quickly Matured Into An Unshakable Habit, Companies Were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' And Generally Cutting As Many Jobs As Possible, White Collar As Well As Blue . . . The New York Times Captured The New Corporate Order Succinctly In 1987, Reporting That... 'all Such Allegiances Are Viewed As Expendable Under The New Rules. With Survival At Stake, Only Market Leadership, Strong Profits And A High Stock Price Can Be Allowed To Matter'.

-Barbara Ehrenreich

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Then, In The 1980's,

Barbara Ehrenreich

...

Then, In The 1980's, Came The Paroxysm Of Downsizing, And The Very Nature Of The Corporation Was Thrown Into Doubt. In What Began Almost As A Fad And Quickly Matured Into An Unshakable Habit, Companies Were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' And Generally Cutting As Many Jobs As Possible, White Collar As Well As Blue . . . The New York Times Captured The New Corporate Order Succinctly In 1987, Reporting That... 'all Such Allegiances Are Viewed As Expendable Under The New Rules. With Survival At Stake, Only Market Leadership, Strong Profits And A High Stock Price Can Be Allowed To Matter'.

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Finding Yourself

Upscale Young Men Seem To Go For The Kind Of Woman Who Plays With A Full Deck Of Credit Cards, Who Won't Cry When She's Knocked To The Ground While Trying To Board The Six O Clock Eastern Shuttle, And Whose Schedule Doesn't Allow For A Sexual Encounter Lasting More Than Twelve Minutes.

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Experimental Science

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Native American

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Positive Thinking

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Positive Thinking

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Public Speaking

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Jesus: A Wine-guzzling Vagrant And Precocious Socialist.

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I'm Not A Nice Person.

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To Be Homeless In America Is To Live Like A Fugitive. The Destitute Are Our Own Native-born "illegals."

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James Bond In His Sean Connery Days ... Was The First Well-known Bachelor On The American Scene Who Was Not A Drifter Or A Degenerate And Did Not Eat Out Of Cans.

There Is A Reason Why America Produced The Most Vigorous Feminist Movement In The World: We Were One Of The Only Countries In Which The Middle Class (which Is Wealthy By World Standards) Customarily Employed Its Own Women As Domestic Servants.

Every Time A Bank Swoops Down To Snatch Up A Home, It Should Be Met With A Crowd Of Jeering, Obstructive Neighbors. And Although This May Be Point 4.5, How About Organizing A Mass Refusal To Pay Back Student Loans?

It Seems To Me That There Must Be An Ecological Limit To The Number Of Paper Pushers The Earth Can Sustain.

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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?

The Seeker Who Embraces Positive Theology Finds ... That You Can Have All That Stuff In The Mall, As Well As The Beautiful House And Car, If Only You Believe That You Can. But ... If You Don't Have All That You Want, If You Feel Sick, Discouraged, Or Defeated, You Have Only Yourself To Blame. Positive Theology Ratifies And Completes A World Without Beauty, Transcendence, Or Mercy.

I Was Raised The Old-fashioned Way, With A Stern Set Of Moral Principles: Never Lie, Cheat, Steal Or Knowingly Spread A Venereal Disease. Never Speed Up To Hit A Pedestrian Or, Or Course, Stop To Kick A Pedestrian Who Has Already Been Hit. From Which It Followed, Of Course, That One Would Never Ever -- On Pain Of Deletion From Dozens Of Christmas Card Lists Across The Country -- Vote Republican.

While Everything Else In Our Lives Has Gotten Simpler, Speedier, More Microwavable And User-friendly, Child-raising Seems To Have Expanded To Fill The Time No Longer Available For It.

Marx Was Wrong: It Is Not Only The 'means Of Production' That Shape Societies, But The Means Of Destruction. In Our Own Time, The Costs Of War, Or Just War Readiness, Are Daunting. ... The Resulting Cost Squeeze Has Led To A New Type Of Society, Perhaps Best Terms A 'depleted' State, In Which The Military Has Drained Reources From All Other Social Functions.

The Nation Was Not Founded By Habitual Groupthinkers. But It Stands A Fair Chance Of Being Destroyed By Them.

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Positive Thinking

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.

However And Wherever War Begins, It Persists, It Spreads, It Propagates Itself Through Time And Across Space With The Terrifying Tenacity Of A Beast Attached To The Neck Of Living Prey. This Is Not An Idly Chosen Figure Of Speech. War Spreads And Perpetuates Itself Through A Dynamic That Often Seems Independent Of Human Will. It Has, As We Like To Say Of Things We Do Not Fully Understand, 'a Life Of Its Own.

The War With Iraq ... Had To Be One Of The Greatest Non Sequiturs In Military History. Attacked By A Gang Composed Largely Of Islamic Militants From Saudi Arabia, The United States Countered By Invading An Unrelated Country, And One Of The Most Secular In The Middle East At That.

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.

The Failure To Think Positively Can Weigh On A Cancer Patient Like A Second Disease.

I Don't Know When The Cult Of Conspicuous Busyness Began, But It Has Swept Up Almost All The Upwardly Mobile, Professional Women I Know. Already, It Is Getting Hard To Recall The Days When, For Example, 'let's Have Lunch' Meant Something Other Than 'i've Got More Important Things To Do Than Talk To You Right Now.

Both Chronic, Long-term Poverty And Downward Mobility From The Middle Class Are In The Same Category Of Things That America Likes Not To Think About.

In A Process That Had Begun In The 1980s And Suddenly Accelerated In The Early 2000s ... [t]he Peaks Of Great Wealth Grew Higher, Rising Up Beyond The Clouds, While The Valleys Of Poverty Sank Lower Into Perpetual Shadow. The Once Broad Plateau Of The Middle Class Eroded Away Into A Narrow Ledge, With The White-knuckled Occupants Holding On For Dear Life.

When You Watch Television, You Never See People Watching Television. We Love Television Because It Brings Us A World In Which Television Does Not Exist.

Even When Uttered By Democrats, "middle Class" Often Sounds Like A Mealymouthed Way Of Saying, "us, And Not Them," Where "them" Includes Poor People, Snake Handlers And Those With Pierced Tongues.

Some People Make Stuff; Other People Have To Buy It. And When We Gave Up Making Stuff, Starting In The 1980s, We Were Left With The Unique Role Of Buying... We've Shopped Till We Dropped Alright, Face Down On The Floor.

For Anyone Worn Down, The Impossible Will Take A Little While Is A Bracing Double Cappuccino.

If There Is No God Or No Evidence Of God And Certainly No Evidence Of A Very Morally Engaged God, Then Whatever Has To Be Done Has To Be Done By Us.

Evidence Of God

Sometime In The Eighties, Americans Had A New Set Of 'traditional Values' Installed. ... The Poor And The Middle Class Were Shaken Down, And Their Loose Change Funneled Blithely Upwards To The Already Overfed.

One Of The Most Essential And Mundane Of Human Activities - Taking Care Of Children - Requires High Levels Of Anxious Vigilance. ... [parents] Dare Not Risk Assuming That The Sudden Quiet From The Toddlers' Room Means They Are Studying With Baby Einstein. Visualize Fratricidal Stranglings And Electric Outlets Stabbed With Forks: This Is How We Have Reproduced Our Genomes.

It's A Glorious Universe The Positive Thinkers Have Come Up With, A Vast, Shimmering Aurora Borealis In Which Desires Mingle Freely With Their Realizations. ... Dreams Go Out And Fulfill Themselves; Wishes Need Only To Be Articulated.

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Given The Cultural Barriers To Intersex Conversation, The Amazing Thing Is That We Would Even Expect Women And Men To Have Anything To Say To Each Other For More Than Ten Minutes At A Stretch.

Well I Do Think There Are People Who Are Habitually Negative And Depressed And Take The Opposite Approach Because They Imagine The Worst, And Their Minds Become Dominated By That. They Let Their Own Emotions And Expectations Transform Their Perceptions Of The World.

Marriage Probably Originated As A Straightforward Food-for-sex Deal Among Foraging Primates. Compatibility Was Not A Big Issue, Nor, Of Course, Was There Any Tension Over Who Would Control The Remote.

To Live In Poverty Is To Live With Constant Uncertainty, To Accept Galling Indignities, And To Expect Harassment By The Police, Welfare Officials And Employers, As Well As By Others Who Are Poor And Desperate.

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The Label Of Liberalism Is Hardly A Sentence To Public Ignominy: Otherwise Bruce Springsteen Would Still Be Rehabilitating Used Cadillacs In Asbury Park And Jane Fonda, For All We Know, Would Be Just Another Overweight Housewife.

Medical Debts Are The Number-one Cause Of Bankruptcy In America.

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Positive Thinking

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Once You Do Lose A Job, There Are Not A Lot Of Social Supports For You. You Lose Health Insurance Because We Have This Absurd System In America Where Health Insurance Is Usually Tied To Employment. Your Income Dips. And That's When You Get Into Selling The House.

Racist, Sexist, And Homophobic Thoughts Cannot, Alas, Be Abolished By Fiat But Only By The Time-honored Methods Of Persuasion, Education And Exposure To The Other Guy's-or Excuse Me, Woman's-point Of View.

Ineluctably, The Insults Inflicted In One War Call Forth New Wars Of Retaliation, Which May Be Waged Within Months Of The Original Conflict Or Generations Later.

Natural Selection, As It Has Operated In Human History, Favors Not Only The Clever But The Murderous.

An Asteroid Could Hit Us At Any Moment. This Is Not - And Also, The Most Successful Kind Of Life On This Planet Is Not Us, It's Microbes. They're The Ones Who Greatly Outnumber Us, And May Eventually Destroy Us.

Considering The Absence Of Legal Coercion, The Surprising Thing Is That Men Have For So Long, And, On The Whole, So Reliably, Adhered To What We Might Call The Breadwinner Ethic.

Crime Seems To Change Character When It Crosses A Bridge Or A Tunnel. In The City, Crime Is Taken As Emblematic Of Class And Race. In The Suburbs Though, It's Intimate And Psychological, A Mystery Resist To Generalization, A Mystery Of The Individual Soul.

It Seems To Me That There Must Be An Ecological Limit To The Number Of Paper Pushers The Earth Can Sustain, And That Human Civilization Will Collapse When The Number Of, Say, Tax Lawyers Exceeds The World's Total Population Of Farmers, Weavers, Fisherpersons, And Pediatric Nurses.

Transcendent Oneness Does Not Require Self-examination, Self-help, Or Self-work. It Requires Self-loss.

Take Motherhood: Nobody Ever Thought Of Putting It On A Moral Pedestal Until Some Brash Feminists Pointed Out, About A Century Ago, That The Pay Is Lousy And The Career Ladder Nonexistent.

In Matters Of The Heart As Well, A Certain Level Of Negativity And Suspicion Is Universally Recommended. You May Try To Project A Thoroughly Positive Outlook In Order To Attract A Potential Boyfriend, But You Are Also Advised To Google Him.

It Was A Real Surprise To Me To Come Across The Evidence That Christianity Might Once Have Been A Danced Religion. Certainly, Some Of The Early Church Leaders Thought This Was Great And Spoke Of What Seems To Have Been Circle Dancing, Perhaps Around An Altar.

What You Don't Necessarily Realize When You Start Selling Your Time By The Hour Is That What You're Really Selling Is Your Life.

As A General Rule, When Something Gets Elevated To Apple-pie Status In The Hierarchy Of American Values, You Have To Suspect That Its Actual Monetary Value Is Skidding Toward Zero. Take Motherhood: Nobody Ever Thought Of Putting It On A Moral Pedestal Until Some Brash Feminists Pointed Out, About A Century Ago, That The Pay Is Lousy And The Career Ladder Nonexistent. Same Thing With Work: Would We Be So Reverent About The 'work Ethic' If It Wasn't For The Fact That The Average Working Stiff's Hourly Pay Is Shrinking, Year By Year.

The "discovery" Of Poverty At The Beginning Of The 1960s Was Something Like The "discovery" Of America Almost Five Hundred Years Earlier. In The Case Of Each Of These Exotic Terrains, Plenty Of People Were On The Site Before The Discoverers Ever Arrived.

The Secret Of The Truly Successful ... Is That They Learned Early In Life How Not To Be Busy.

People Tend To Judge Presidents On How The Economy Performs, And Yet We Don't Expect Them To Have The Power To Do Much About It. Or We Don't Want Them To Exercise That Power, If They Were To Have It.

When I Was Born, My Father Was A Copper Miner In Butte, Montana. It Was A Hard-core, Blue-collar Situation.

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.

The Less Sophisticated Of My Forbears Avoided Foreigners At All Costs, For The Very Good Reason That, In Their Circles, Speaking In Tongues Was Commonly A Prelude To Snake Handling. The More Tolerant Among Us Regarded Foreign Languages As A Kind Of Speech Impediment That Could Be Overcome By Willpower.

No One Should Be Incarcerated For Debt Or Squeezed For Money They Have No Chance Of Getting Their Hands On.

Wars Produce Warlike Societies, Which In Turn Make The World More Dangerous For Other Societies, Which Are Thus Recruited Into Being War-prone Themselves.

At Wal-mart, A Co-worker Once Advised Me That, Although I Had A Lot To Learn, It Was Also Important Not To "know Too Much," Or At Least Never To Reveal One's Full Abilities To Management, Because "the More They Think You Can Do, The More They'll Use You And Abuse You." My Mentors In These Matters Were Not Lazy; They Just Understood That There Are Few Or No Rewards For Heroic Performance. The Trick Lies In Figuring Out How To Budget Your Energy So There'll Be Some Left Over For The Next Day.

Roman Catholicism: A Hundred Million People Bowing Down Before A Flesh-hating, Elderly Celibate.

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.

Americans Love Marriage Too Much. We Rush Into Mariage With Abandon, Expecting A Micro-utopia On Earth. We Pile All Our Needs Onto It, Our Expectations, Neuroses, And Hopes. In Fact, We've Made Marriage Into The Panda Bear Of Human Social Institutions: We've Loved It To Death.

Feminists Have Not Tried To "destroy The Family". We Just Thought The Family Was Such A Good Idea That Men Might Want To Get Involved In It Too.

At Issue Is Not Only Knowledge Of The World But Our Survival As Individuals And As A Species. All The Basic Technologies Ever Invented By Humans To Feed And Protect Themselves Depend On A Relentless Commitment To Hard-nosed Empiricism: You Cannot Assume That Your Arrowheads Will Pierce The Hide Of A Bison Or That Your Raft Will Float Just Because The Omens Are Propitious And You Have Been Given Supernatural Reassurance That They Will. You Have To Be Sure.

It Is The Marketplace That Calls Most Clearly For Men To Be Softer, More Narcissistic And Receptive, And The New Man Is The Result.

But Our Culture Is In Truly Bad Shape If We Have Come To Define Respecting Something As The Failure To Set It On Fire.

The Fastest-growing Brand Of Religion Is Of The Magical 'name It And Claim It' Variety, In Which The Deity Exists Only To Meet One's Immediate, Self-identified Needs.

From The Point Of View Of The Pharmaceutical Industry, The Aids Problem Has Already Been Solved. After All, We Already Have A Drug Which Can Be Sold At The Incredible Price Of $8,000 An Annual Dose, And Which Has The Added Virtue Of Not Diminishing The Market By Actually Curing Anyone.

That's The Really Neat Thing About Dan Quayle, As You Must Have Realized From The First Moment You Looked Into Those Lovely Blue Eyes: Impeachment Insurance.

Money Does Not Bring Happiness' - Only The Wherewithal, Perhaps, To Endure Its Absence.

The 'working Poor,' As They Are Approvingly Termed, Are In Fact The Major Philanthropists Of Our Society.

... There Hasn't Been A Serious Life-style Trend Since The Couch Potato Was Sighted, In About 1986, On One Of Its Rare Forays To The Video Store. Cocooning Remains A Significant Mass Enterprise, Encouraged By The Availability Of Five Hundred New Cable Channels And Microwavable Popcorn.

You Still Don't Like The Idea Of Gay Marriage? Then, As My Friend, The Economist Julianne Malveaux, Says: Don't Marry A Gay Person. Case Closed, Problem Solved.

Lenders, Including Major Credit Companies As Well As Payday Lenders, Have Taken Over The Traditional Role Of The Street-corner Loan Shark, Charging The Poor Insanely High Rates Of Interest.

Our Great Common Challenge ... Is To Free People From Religion, Get It Out Of Our Laws, Our Schools, Our Health Systems, Our Government And, I Would Add, Also Our Sporting Events. I Would Really Like To See Some Separation Of Church And Stadium, If We Could Work On That.

The Republicans Hardly Need A Party And The Cumbersome Cadre Of Low-level Officials That Form One; They Have A Bankroll As Large As The Pentagon's Budget, Dozens Of Fatted Pacs, And The Well-advertised Support Of The Christian Deity.

Personally, I Have Nothing Against Work, Particularly When Performed, Quietly And Unobtrusively, By Someone Else. I Just Don't Happen To Think It's An Appropriate Subject For An 'ethic.'

At Best The Family Teaches The Finest Things Human Beings Can Learn From One Another Generosity And Love. But It Is Also, All Too Often, Where We Learn Nasty Things Like Hate, Rage And Shame.

In Our Culture, The Professional, And Largely White, Middle Class Is Taken As A Social Norm - A Bland And Neutral Mainstream - From Which Every Other Group Or Class Is Ultimately A Kind Of Deviation.

By The Reagan Era, The 'culture Of Poverty' Had Become A Cornerstone Of Conservative Ideology: Poverty Was Caused Not By Low Wages Or A Lack Of Jobs But By Bad Attitudes And Faulty Lifestyles. The Poor Were Dissolute, Promiscuous, Prone To Addiction And Crime, Unable To 'defer Gratification' Or Possibly Even Set An Alarm Clock. The Last Thing They Could Be Trusted With Was Money.

When Television Families Aren't Gathered Around The Kitchen Table Exchanging Wisecracks, They Are Experiencing Brief But Moving Dilemmas, Which Are Handily Solved By The Youngest Child Or By Some Cute Extraterrestrial Houseguest. Emerging From Family Ties Or My Two Dads, We Are Forced To Acknowledge That Our Own Families Are Made Up Of Slow-witted, Emotionally Crippled People Who Would Be Lucky To Qualify For Seats In The Studio Audience Of Jeopardy!

A Free-enterprise Economy Depends Only On Markets, And According To The Most Advanced Mathematical Macroeconomic Theory, Markets Depend Only On Moods: Specifically, The Mood Of The Men In The Pinstripes, Also Known As The Boys On The Street. When The Boys Are In A Good Mood, The Market Thrives; When They Get Scared Or Sullen, It Is Time For Each One Of Us To Look Into The Retail Apple Business.

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