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The insight that I took from the article was that the middle class has a lot it can learn from working-class folk -- that "preening about your job and your school" are far less meaningful in the long run than working-class community values, the whole "we look out for each other" ethos that seems to be utterly lost the higher you go on the socioeconomic scale. Middle-class folk, encapsulated in their blister-pack suburbs and their corporate/academic/materialistic hierarchies, seem to have left such ways behind -- but when the crash comes, those are the values that will matter.
You are exactly right. This is how my family got through the Great Depression -- uncles and cousins took care of cousins and uncles, kids helped grandparents, grandparents helped kids, and so on.
And add to the witch's brew the much larger numbers of broken/dysfunctional/estranged families today so that you can't even count on your own family much less your friends and neighbors. The secret to survival during the Depression was the fact that more families back then were intact. Now there's a saying that when poverty moves in, love moves out.
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