Avoiding Last Place: Some Things We Don't Outgrow (2011)

When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I was working at an ISP and learning bsd and Linux. I had accumulated a first tier of working knowledge - I could just barely use the system but to my friends and family I was a unix god. Being a kid with my first taste of authority, I remember how opposed I was to tool improvements that made these systems more accessible. I was complaining to my boss, a unix greybeard, and he got really annoyed with me and explained that the system should be improved so that everyone can benefit from it.

I read this and I think I just understood a little better how petty I am.

It makes sense that people making just above minimum wage would be opposed to raising it. I'd assume they had put in more time/effort than their coworkers to make those extra dollars an hour and were rewarded accordingly. Let's say they're making like 12 an hour as a shift manager. If the minimum wage were to suddenly increase to 12 an hour, the only people who would benefit would be those making less than that currently. The business would absolutely not give raises to all of its other employees to keep the ratio as it was before.

So suddenly, all the hard work for the extra few dollars an hour have gone to waste. It would feel like the people who benefitted got a raise for nothing, while the other person actually had to earn it. Of course they would be opposed to that.

It's a tough situation - how do you raise the minimum wage without everything else increasing with it or people harboring resentment?

May be another example of this. A lot of white people in the south didn't own slaves. They were very poor but they opposed emancipation because they didn't want to be equal to the freed slaves. I don't really know how historically accurate this is though.

This is only new for people who did not grow up in poverty. For those of us who were below the middle class, the daily competition to avoid last place was a fact of life in school and in college, and those behaviors and scars don't heal easily, even after you've escaped the pit.

Upward mobility is not completely a myth, but it's a dream akin in actual probability to making it in professional sports, at least here in the USA (in my case, growing up just across the Bay from Silicon Valley).

"Trickle down economics"- aka "Reaganomics"- the great dream of the Republicans- has exacerbated the situation over the last 35 years. I wonder how I was lucky enough to get out.

The rich don't need to keep the poor down, sadly. The poor do a good enough job of keeping one another down.

Does this explain why some LGB hate the T?

Why marginalized groups will gladly marginalize other groups?

Humans are a sad bunch.