Blue Blood

There are very different ideas of what constitutes "making it" culture to culture, country to country. In the UK, for example, you can be "upper class" or "an aristocrat" while dining on soup-kitchen donated food by kerosene lamp in a giant house held together by gravity as it slowly falls in on itself over the course of generations. Some ancestor whose name is definitely written down somewhere solemnly accepted a title and the parcel of land you still occupy from, like, William the Conquerer in happy recompense for helping to pacify the Welsh marches or whatever, but those peons and tenant farmers that propped you up stopped contributing their tithings some time between the Reformation and the steam engine, way before anyone had to figure out how to pay for both central heating and dry rot repair. But nobody is ever going to confuse you for, like, a pipe-fitter, so, congratulations I guess. Pipe fitters bear the unmistakeable mark of being socially useful, after all, and all you've got are some vintage tweeds and hemophilia.

It's a little less romantic in the good ole US of A as we tend to simply peg a person's value to, well, their actual literal value. Rich people wouldn't be rich if Jesus, in his American cultural role as Santa Claus For Adults, didn't approve of who they were or how they were conducting themselves. Conversely of course the link between poverty and wickedness is not only tacit but punched, dented into the default verbiage of all two of our political parties. Republicans and Democrats may feel plenty divided these days on a range of dire, life-or-death issues, but the one thing that can always bring them together is punishing the destitute with the threat of destitution for the unforeseeable future. It's OK though, because we're not really taking that much. How do you take something from people who have nothing? Well, that's a trick question, you obviously drive them into more and more unpayable, quality-of-life-crushing debt with fuel prices, food prices, housing inaccessibility and the killing (haha) blow of sudden, drowning, tidal-weight medical debt. Sure the parties alter the way they frame it--Democrats with "we need to give people a hand up" suggesting there's something about being working class that needs to be reviled and cured, and Republicans with "what if we just herded them all into a pen and fed them poison?"--but in practical terms the results are exactly the same.

In a context like this, what even is luxury? I've got one idea: let's say you have like 50 people all working in one place. They all lose their jobs at the same time, but half of them (contractors) are out on the street with nothing but a payout of whatever PTO time they hadn't spent and the other half (direct workers) still have to leave, but they get to "opt" for six months of continued pay and medical benefits. It makes it reeeeeeally hard to complain or be all that bitter when you're one of the ones in the six-month buffer class and you're watching your contractor colleagues talk about how to apply for unemployment and/or disability. You still do complain, of course, just not to them.

Today is my final day before my six months of administrative leave starts. I count myself lucky as I've got some medical tests for some lingering conditions coming up. There's a low but non-zero chance something larger, more debilitating and thus decadently expensive comes up from all this testing. Having steady health insurance in America in 2026 is the equivalent of a manor house would have been in like 1700. The good news is, I can't pass any medical debt on to my children. Yet. There's still time on the congressional calendar to make me a real aristocrat.