The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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My mama told me, way more than a few times: Go to College. The first time she told me that was after a buddy and myself made a deal with our neighbor to pull two of his stumps, I think for $10 a stump. Not being professional stump pullers – actually these were our first stump jobs – we had no idea how long it might take to dig around an old maple tree, whack off its roots with axes and hatchets, put a come-a-long on the thing and haul it out. Like pulling a giant tooth, how hard could it be?

Two days later, blisters on both our hands, we finally disgorged the monster stump. Nothing to it! Course, we had the other one to do and now we knew – and dreaded – the work ahead of us. But a contract was a contract, a handshake a handshake, even for us 15 year olds. So much for our summer vacation. Our neighbor gave us each 10 bucks and no tip, no bonus, no thank you. Four days of hard labor. My mother, on the other hand, had a tip waiting for me at home.

“What do you think you made an hour?” she wanted to know. “Not much,” I said, pretty bummed and very tired. I figured a quarter an hour. And yeah, don’t say it, I know a quarter was worth more in 1965.

My mom asked if I had any idea how much my father made an hour. Actually, I didn’t, not a clue, but I hazarded ‘fifty cents?” Mom, well, let’s just say she didn’t have the greatest sense of humor, especially not wise-ass son humor, so she cut right to her Lesson of the Day, told me he made 50 times what I just made, all because – and here was the crux – He Went to College.

Now, I didn’t tell her I’d eventually have my own stump removal company, hire a hundred kids to pull them, franchise the whole she-bang and become a millionaire when the stock went public. I just put my head down and said. “I got it Mom.” I did go to college but ended up working stump pulling wages at various dead end jobs before becoming a starving artist.

Today I was at an oral surgeon seeing about yanking a tooth too far gone for a root canal and crown. My doc came in, said hello, snapped on some blue exam gloves, looked in my pie hole and said make an appointment at the desk for an extraction while you’re paying for this exam. At most, 5 minutes. The bill came to $100. If you’re as expert at math as me, a college graduate, that comes to $1200 an hour.

So okay, Mom, happy now??

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This past winter we holed up one night in San Jose, Costa Rica on the way back home. Miles of razor wire, concrete walls, security gates, metal fences. Not a place where you’d take a stroll after dark, maybe not even in the daylight. The motel we’re at here in Oakland reminds me of the barrio down south, ramshackle houses, razor wire, homeless encampments, a third world nation invisible to most of the 1%’ers who would gladly take welfare away from these poor and add it to their portfolios. It’s a land of equal opportunity, they like to argue, and these people squandered it out of laziness or because of drug dependency.

The America of gated communities, razor wired walls and security patrols is fast coming, a nation that blames the victims and champions a bully President and his toady minions. We will have walls within walls, walls at the borders, walls in the cities and walls in the prisons and detention centers.

In the land of really not very equal opportunity, the Ladder to Success is missing a few rungs for, say, someone of color, or a woman, or an immigrant than, oh, the son of an Ivy Leaguer. If you start at the bottom, you might hit a home run, but not one 1/100th as likely as the guy born on third base whose dad owns the stadium.

There will always be inequality in a democracy but let’s not call the attempts to minimize it ‘socialism’. Trying to shift the wealth to correct those income gaps only seems unfair to those at the top who don’t find a problem with lowering corporate taxes or skyrocketing CEO pay, or taxing stock portfolios as capital gains, not income. They know perfectly well how to redistribute wealth; after all, they write the laws. And from the looks of things here at street level, they want more and maybe they want it all. We’ll see how that works when they’re afraid to leave their walled kingdom without bodyguards they trust.

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