Fighting Misery and Precarity

There's two ways to explain why anything happens: The reason it happened and to what end it happened. The first way seeks causal explanation of the phenomenon, it looks for epistemological ground. The second way seeks clarity of purpose, a clean teleology. The first one you can answer with "it happened because...", the second one you can answer with "it happens so that...". Both are of the highest concern; if one understanding is missing, it's harder for you to be at ease.

Why do we call certain situations "precarious"? It's a why of the first kind. Consider what type of situations you'd call precarious. The dictionary says it conveys a sense of doubt or uncertainty. Standard etymology suggests it comes from Latin prex/precis ("prayer"), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *preḱ- (“to request, ask”).

Makes sense. If you have to ask for it, then it's precarious... you may or may not get it. Doubtful or uncertain, like the fate of a glass standing at the edge of the table; accident prone, at the mercy of incident. Saying something is precarious means something is wrong, in the sense that something important is at jeopardy. We say it to someone who cares for what is at risk and we do it so they may do something about it... a why of the second kind.

Precarious is the life of people in real misery, at risk of falling further in despair. Precarious is the roof of families in tenements, living at the mercy of greed. Precarious is living a medical emergency away from bankruptcy. Precarious is the journey of the migrant. Precarious are the moves of the acrobat without a net hanging below. Precarious is all that lacking protection, in the form of tangible separation from risk.

The things you care about, call them caresakes. You care for them, for their sake. Consider a child, a home, a friend, a parent. Consider the place that saw you born and the space around you. Consider your neighbor and the people of your place... do you care for them?

A family is that which shares something at birth. Blood, names, a roof – enveloping everyone like a matrice, establishing kin. People become family through commonality to a shared parent, to a shared space, to a shared story. Coming together, entering fellowship through a sense of primordial connection.

Familial bonds establish a first duty of care among people. You feel a duty to care for those people you consider family. You care for them, because together you're part of a bigger whole; what happens to them becomes part of your bigger story. They make you feel something, a sense of shared fate that inspires compassion and solidarity.

In the year 2022 A.D., the avenues of New York City are lined with misery. Their magnificence, dimmed by the crying plight of people in ruin, begging for mercy at every corner. Each trip outside you will see it in the face, misery. Sad as it is, you learn to blur them in perception. You try to keep it together in their presence – composed, cold, unaffected. Soon you succeed, the stench becomes familiar, misery becomes tolerated. However reluctantly, it becomes a fixture in your day.

It's harder when no one cares. You suffer a bad slip and it's game over, no one to pick you up. It's precarious, living without family. At the mercy of accident, you're vulnerable. It's a real possibility, falling from grace and into the cracks. In America it happens often, it only takes a look at your local homeless encampment.

Picture a family, parents with adult children. The siblings, most are doing fine; one is extremely wealthy, another is notably poor. Would the parents do well to call on their children to help their sibling in need? Consider food assistance, medical expenses, children's college, or other worthy causes.

In the year 2020, while America's workplaces shuttered to combat the spread of COVID-19, droves of people kept showing up to work as usual. We started calling them "essential workers": People working factories, doing deliveries, and keeping supermarkets open. Essential were all those who couldn't work through screens at home; workers in construction, those caring for our seniors, those providing city services.

It was a rare public acknowledgement of class in America, a functional class. The solidarity of essential workers inspired a sense of respect – they were risking their lives. Hundreds of billboards appeared across the land in recognition of their service. Their work made it possible for everyone else to stay home.

But our essential workers, what motivated many of them to risk their lives in service wasn't a holy sense of duty but rather a pressing need for money. Paying bills, bringing food, paying rent; their solidarity was compelled by economic need. Precarity.

It eats you, rentism... its a system that keeps you moving, sometimes against your wish. In America we like to keep it quiet, that we're not all treated equal. But some people are paid rents and that alone splits the republic in two. The rentier class weathered the pandemic from a second home in the woods, the others worked through it to keep the rents flowing.

Is America a family? It's a worthy goal. Imagine hundreds of millions living together, sharing land, sharing story, sharing values, standing in solidarity with one another. To a large extent we do, but it's also telling, the degrees to which we won't commit to help our fellow American.

During the pandemic the more vulnerable helped the well off, you could call it "upward solidarity". If there was a growing sense of unease among people it was because it didn't feel fair. Working class people are rarely blessed with solidarity from above, that's not what America is not known for. To the contrary, we're known for the struggle.

Call it the American Dream, the story of success against the odds. It's the narrative we live by. As a story of triumph in adversity, the American Dream puts the onus on you to overcome hardships on your way to abundance. The hardship comes from an unsupportive environment, a market system where actors use all leverage at their disposal to extract value out of you. A hazing.

Hustle, rise and grind. No benefit accrues to you that you didn't sweat. Downward solidarity has real limits in America. The rentier class will first pay a friendly politician's way into office than splitting rents with Uncle Sam in hopes of making abundance less hard for fellow Americans. Any attempt to compel solidarity from the upper classes shall be met with strong resistance, labeled a punishment of success. They propose keeping the environment unsupportive is key to the American Dream. May this practice come to an end.

In any bigger whole, the occurrence of misery is like a rot, an unacceptable state of decay. It's a call for help, like a plant crying for water as it withers, a call you can't ignore if you truly care. You sure can't ignore it in your family, it makes you feel unwell. Tolerance of misery is a litmus test for care, a true show of feelings. If you're unmoved by their misery, they don't feel like family.

A modern conception of family builds on the traditional by way of acknowledging the commonalities that bring us together as a nation. Consider ethnicity, place of residence, vocational activity... people are connected into bigger wholes by these and other aspects. These are families of a different kind, but families all the same. We owe these groups a duty of care, we owe them at least a word of support on their way out of misery and precarity.

If America is a family, we're pretending something else. We have hundreds of thousands in homelessness and millions facing eviction. We have more than a million people in prison and millions more in correction. As you read these words, tens of millions in America can't afford food without assistance and tens of millions more live without medical insurance. These are people in precarity and utter misery for which the American Dream may never blossom.

The best version of America is a union that works for every one in the fullest sense of the word. Graceful and compassionate, it's a version we're not fighting for. Our aversion to tax and solidary tribute, our blind trust of the market system and brash competitiveness, our weakness to the mystical allure of absurd wealth; we fight for the wrong things while our most vulnerable keep falling in neglect.

If we're building nation together, it's better to understand why. The answer lies not behind but in front of us, it's a why of the second kind. We're not together to enable excess and absurdity, of wealth or anywise. We're here to provide for the self and bigger self, for the families that care for us. We're here to care back, for the place we live and the communities that need us. We're a meaningful union in true solidarity – across groups, sectors, and identities; among cultures, genders, and functions. A family of societies, that's the true spirit of the American union.

Building nation is making sense of how we fit together. We need to build it everyday, save each other from hardship. The fallen don't have a voice, we ought to listen to their silent plight. It's our motto to build melodies, e pluribus unum. Out of many, One.

✎ Connection to

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• Topic / What is New York?

• Topic / The Production of Harmony

• Key / The Prevention of Misery and Tragedy

• Topic / The Developmental History of America