On The Waterfront

If you refer to the "working class," you're not part of it  


I don't remember where I heard or read it first. However, it is one of those truisms that has meant more and more to me over the years.


As someone who can honestly claim to have a working-class background, I have no patience for all of those academics, psuedo-intellectuals and bullshit bohemians who romanticize it.  For all of the financial and other struggles I've had, I am glad that my life has not been defined by the constraints of being a member of such a class.  


From the time my great-grandparents emigrated to this country (just over a century ago) until my parents' generation, all of my male relatives did blue-collar work.  My father did, too, right up until my sophomore year at Rutgers.  So I understand how hard and dangerous such work can be, and I respect those who've toiled at it.


Some of the men on my mother's side of the family were longshoremen on the waterfronts of New York and New Jersey until crates that were unloaded by hand gave way to large metal containers that could be hoisted by crane onto trucks.  


The new shipping method eliminated lots of jobs and concentrated the work in a few small areas of the waterfront.  Now, a part of the Jersey City waterfront that once teemed with ships and dock workers is now a harborside mall of corporate towers.  Some of them are offices of companies in the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) industries, while others house the people who work in them.

  


Some of those people, of course, are the ones responsible for eliminating some of those old workers' jobs, and outsourcing other work.  They come from somewhere else; the profits they generate go somewhere else and most of what they spend goes to businesses and companies located elsewhere.  In fact, just a few blocks away from this so-called "Gold Coast" is what used to be called the "inner city":  an expanse of poverty and decay, with schools that were so bad that the State took control of them from the city.  Of course, none of the people who live or work in the towers send their kids to those schools.