And Rich, I don't mean to be flippant. I honest to god don't know what to tell people like you.

I have never owned new kitchen or laundry appliances. Never owned a home. Never owned a car newer than 10 years old. I am not college educated (despite Big Mick's insistence that I am an ivory tower university intellectual). I never aspired to live a middle class life style. I love working as an artist activist in a progressive community of people. The work I've always had has been low wage, and I and my family lived without health insurance for decades, until I was finally hired to a full time, benefits eligible position in 2001. I was laid off from that job in 2002, but rehired in fall 2003. So the unemployment see saw has been pretty damn scary too. But that is the daily reality I, and other working class families face. It makes you pretty scrappy and resourceful, though! Which I suppose is one of the reasons why staring into my babies' faces never unnerved me enough to bargain with the Republicrat devils.

But I've never regretted the decisions I've made, despite it being a pretty tough life in the financial sense, and certainly in terms of status vis a vis the middle class people I'm surrounded by, especially at work. I work in K12 education as a paraprofessional, and my partner, who also doesn't have a college degree, works at a Big Ten university without benefits.

Maybe I'm deeply satisfied with and proud of the life I've lived because I'm an artist, and artists worth their salt (as opposed to dancing monkeys, that is) live at society's margins, not at it's center. Maybe it's because life at the margins of our wealthy American society is a damn sight better than life at the margins of society most anywhere else in the world, so we got by pretty easy for the most part. I dont' know.

I just know that now that the kids are getting older, with no retirement benefits beyond some paltry Social Security I'll likely never see, and a pittance remaining in my public school pension that will likely disappear before I retire too, I'm not caving in to the temptations of being adored and accepted by the middle class liberals or conservatives. I'd rather die naked and alone on the street on a January night in Ely and be dragged off by hungry timberwolves, than throw my lot in with the Republicrats.

As you might have guessed by now, I have some pretty strong feelings about all this. ;-)

You've always got a choice. Depends upon whether you let fear mongering Clinton Democrats and fear mongering Bush Republicans dictate the terms of your life, or you choose a more beautiful, uplifting, hopeful kind of future and work your ass off to reach for it, I guess. That is the life I chose to live, and like I said, I've never regretted it for an instance.

Good luck wrestling those demons.