| | "It's amazing how those people live."
This was said to me this afternoon by one of the bankers at work, a mom-aged Norwegian woman who likes to think of herself as "trendy". She had borrowed the bank's camera (of which I am guardian) for some civic-minded project or other and was returning it to me, asking if I could download the pictures onto the Mac for her. I agreed, and one by one they popped up on the screen.
"Those people" turned out to refer to poor people, and I think her "amazing" actually meant revolting. She was clearly shocked and horrified by the pictures (15 total), which showed various rooms in "those people"s' homes. One-level homes, the walls painted in shiny, garishly bright colors, each room furnished with one piece of furniture -- a bed, say, or a couch. The closets contained unfinished particle-board shelving units. The floors were cheaply carpeted in brown shag and littered with cast-off clothes and broken toys. And every once in a while, peeping from behind a doorway or captured in the reflection of an uncurtained window, was one of the little house's curious residents.
The picture that shocked the banker the most was of the bathroom. There was a little mildew on the tiled walls, and the showerhead was rusty. Atop the toilet sat a radio from the early 1980s, and above the stand-alone sink hung an unframed mirror. I sighed a little, reminded of Homer Court (the place I lived in at college) and my forlorn little apartment in Chicago, where the bathroom hosted that very same species of mildew, as well as spiders the size of my hand.
"It's amazing how those people live."
I've never been rich, but I've never been what I considered to be poor, either. And while I put my dirty clothes into a hamper and not on the floor, I can't say the paint jobs in my residences have been any better, my shelves less crappy, or my showerheads less rusty. After a moment's mental digestion of her words, I realized they had stung. I realized that I felt insulted -- not only because she looked down on "those people" who, like me, could not afford to have Ethan Allan decorators fill their home with yuppie mahogany shit, but that she thought I was like her, looking down upon the unfortunate from our great height, callous in our great pity.
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| | Posted 3/16/2009 5:35 PM - 21 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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