Individuals can get out of low-wage jobs, but low-wage jobs can't get out of a capitalist economy. And, as we perfectly well know, this notion that people can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and 'move on up' is a chimera. There's more upward mobility in many other countries. Why pretend otherwise?
My other point is this: the people who join the service don't think their lives are in any rut. Despair just isn't a word I'd use to describe them. When their other son, Doc, comes home from the dairy smelling like cow shit, sometimes his wife or mom will say, "pppppppppeeeeeeeeeeuuuu!" To which Doc or his father will take a deep breath and say, "Smells like a paycheck to me," and Doc will grab his mom and force her to dance with him so she can get a little closer and smell the paycheck.
I don't see them as striving, status-conscious assholes who'd step over other people to make it. Other son sure isn't. In fact, last summer even when I had a job, he intended to give sonshine money from his signing bonus -- so sonshine could buy a new car. I told him to keep his money.
Other son doesn't have a monster SUV, he has always had what they fondly call, "rice burners". When sonshine wanted a pimped out cadillac for his first car, other son counseled him to buy a gas efficient Honda or Mazda. How is this a kid on par with some stock broker tooling around in a hummer? He drives the kind of car a hummer would crush.
Jamal, when I visited the hood last, was driving a beat up 10 y.o. Nissan Maxima, the doors painted black on a white chassis. He could afford and he was right proud of that car. When he saw me drive into the complex, he was driving his friends around the lot and hung out the window to wave me to down to show off. "Hey look Mama! I got me a car!" Jared, Anton, Marcus, and Nick -- none of them tool around in an SUV.
I suppose you could fault them for wanting cars at all. These aren't kids who are strangers to public transportation. They lived in what people in the area call "the West side ghetto" The East side ghetto is where MLK boulevard is, closer to 'downtown' and there's a bit of a rivalry, West siders don't go into East sider territory -- it's not racist and it's not really 'gang' stuff just the stuff of teenage boys for nearly a century and a half that I know of. The stuff of Harvard pranks -- if you know your history of youth in the u.s., you know what I mean. Both neighborhoods are majority black. It is, however, a rivalry that is the product of class antagonisms. The East side is the old, established ghetto and the people who moved to the subsidized housing developments were seen as betraying people in the 'hood when they left. And old wound from the struggles of the 60s and 70s that has been taken up by kids who don't even understand what the issues were then. It reminds me of the taunts thrown at the children of people who went to work for Tops market in my hometown. It was union store and the union is run by mafia, or so some of us heard at the dinner table. So, it was suitable enough to hurl on the baseball field. We had no idea what it meant, but we perceived that working for a union was a bad thing. (Big anti-union town because the rumor was that union folk were uppity -- the reason why the plants were shutting down, one after the other.
When I lived in Solvay, I used to talk to the folks at the Little League. Solvay was a one company town, an urban village situated right on the city limits of Syracuse. It was populated with immigrants from Russia, Poland, Eastern Europe, and a certain area in Italy, name of which I've forgotten. They were brought over here _by_ Solvay Process (late Allied Chemical) to populate the chemical factory.
For nearly 100 years, people worked at the plant, fairly decent (though very dangerous) jobs. Their children grew up, went to school, and looked forward to a decent job in a factory which afforded them a modest home, good bennies. Not the kinds of salaries auto plant workers made in Michigan, but OK jobs nonetheless.
The plant, of course, closed leaving the Syracuse area with the most polluted lake in the world. It also left behind shattered people. They all eventually got on their feet. Syracuse survived the downsizings, but only because it broke up families forced to scatter across the country to find work or commute to places like Binghamton, Rochester, and Albany. As a data point, "In the Central New York Region, 13,000 jobs were lost between 1990 and 1995 and yet the unemployment rate is 4.3%. This is not because job creation has kept pace, but because 12,000 workers left the region."
That's an assload of people who've had to uproot their lives innit?
At the little league games, I'd talk to guys who'd gone to work as school bus drivers or went to school to get training in a white collar job or maybe take work as janitors. Sure, they were fine, but they were disappointed. It was a shock to them to have the American Dream exposed as a sham. They grew up in a world where they thought they simply had to work hard, toe the line, do right, and settle down into a modest house. IT's not that they felt they had to have Rolex watches--though maybe they would like some top o' the line tools for their shop or a nice big ol' easy chair and big television (wide screens weren't out yet).
Why do we say, "Buck up and get with the program. Life sucks? Move to Dallas and get a job. Can't find work as a welder? Learn to live simply and suck it up, chump!"?
That seems like asking people to conform to a system that is simply unjust at its core, asking them to accomodate its injustices to them.
It just doesn't seem to be the same thing as thinking that addicts ought to quit whining and get off the booze.
As I said before, if every addict got of the booze/dope, there's plenty of room for the sober. A Capitalist economy doesn't manufacture scarcity in sobriety.
It does, however, manufacture scarcity in terms of income and welth and decent jobs