Culture Corner
The Real Deal
Sometimes I feel like our culture values and rewards the wrong things. And I’m not even talking about the Kim Kardashians, Paris Hiltons, and other professional famous people who take up half our news cycle with their nothing and have a bazillion followers on Twitter.
I’m talking about our culture of academics and the way it prizes and rewards certain things above others.
I’m talking about the over-valuation of people like me.
*
The gray-haired lady sitting next to me on the subway thumbs through a veritable deck of dirty metrocards. At her feet lie two large, sturdy paper bags stuffed to the point of bursting with empty bottles and soda cans, clearly for exchange purposes. Her tweed blazer is faded and fraying and doesn’t match her patterned shirt.
I watch her shuffle through the deck a few times, then decide to speak up, because a) if I don’t ask what she’s planning to do with all those metrocards, I’m gonna wonder about it forever, and b) several of my fiction works involve homeless characters and I don’t like to pass up an opportunity to learn more, and she doesn’t even smell bad.
“What are you going to do with those?”
She looks up, not at all offended by the question. “I use them.” Her words are faintly accented but I suck at accents that aren’t British, Australian, or South African, so I can’t tell what it is. Not white-bread American, that’s all I can say for sure.
“They have money on them?”
“Yes, ten cents, twenty cents.” She points to a couple of the cards in turn. “People throw them out. I use them. I don’t pay for trains.”
“Yeah, why pay if you don’t have to?”
She smiles at me and leans over a little with a conspiratorial whisper, “People tease me about these.” A gesture at the bags. “They say I look like homeless person, but I don’t care. This is three dollars.”
I swallow my guilt over the fact that this conversation probably wouldn’t be happening if I hadn’t made that very assumption. Slick, SM. Check your middle-class white girl prejudices at the door next time, why don’cha? “Yeah, who cares? Money is money. When my brother and I were kids, we had this whole thing where we were gonna collect all the soda bottles and get money for them. But it was too much work and we were too lazy to follow through.”
“This is my exercise,” she laughs. “I tell myself, other people go to gym; I collect these things. Too busy for gym.”
“Do you have a job?” I ask, hoping that’s not too rude.
“I work,” she replies amiably. “I am secretary.”
“Cool. I don’t work; I still live with my parents.”
“Secretary is good job, if you need one,” she says helpfully. “And cashier at grocery store.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure they’re hiring by me, though.”
“What do your parents do?” she asks.
“My parents? They’re teachers.”
“Oh, you rich!” she exclaims with a smile. “You don’t need to work. You rich.”
I laugh because that is honestly the first time anyone’s ever called me rich, but in the context of this conversation, I most certainly am. “Well, I’ll have to work eventually. I don’t expect people to keep giving me stuff.”
We continue talking, about my family, her family, my classes, and random bits and bobs that float in and out of the conversation. When I draw a blank on what to say next, she chimes in with questions of her own. I’m occasionally conscious of other people in the train car watching us bemusedly, this pretty, well-dressed white girl and this homeless-looking lady conversing like old friends, and I think, “Stop staring. Why should it make a difference who talks to who? We’re all just people here.”
I forget to ask her for her name until she’s just about to get off the train. It gets lost in the platform hubbub, and then the doors slide shut behind her.
*
It’s encounters like that that make me rethink our whole system. Make me look at myself in relation to the world and the things I’ve done and question the ways I’m treated.
Because I’m on a full-ride merit-based college scholarship; I’ve got an additional outside stipend from a separate foundation; plus, I just got awarded almost $2,500 dollars to go to Hollywood over winter break to conduct research for a novel I’m working on. All that stuff is awesome, but what did I do to get it?
I put words together. Seriously, that’s pretty much it. I put words together consistently, in keeping with deadlines, over a long period of time, on a wide variety of subjects. Yay me.
Our culture claims to value intelligence, resourcefulness, perseverance, and hard work. But it doesn’t really. It doesn’t value that lady on the subway, who works herself to the bone and cuts corners and spends hours a day collecting metrocards and recyclables just to get by. It values and throws money at people like me, who do nothing substantial beyond put words on a page, who can’t drive, have never paid rent, or even bought a single roll of toilet paper for themselves.
Don’t get me wrong; plenty of college scholarship kids have their own apartments and work real jobs and take care of themselves. But I’m not one of those. Blog posts and essays like this are probably my most tangible contributions.
So now that you’ve read this, my masterpiece and true example of my value to society, I ask you: Am I worth it?
—Sarah Meira Rosenberg
Image Source: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/18/timestopics/metrocard_395.jpg
* * * * *
I wrote this last semester, and it’s the piece that I want to leave on the blog as we part for the summer, and as I leave Brooklyn College, because the questions are still relevant. I suspect they will always be relevant, that spectacular people will never be valued as much as they should be, and that people like me will be elevated and esteemed and respected far more than we deserve.
—SM
