Dear BARB,

Dear Ms. Ehrenreich,


I recently moved to Maine and participated in Brunswick's Community Read of your book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Since you're coming to town today to discuss it with us all, I thought I'd jot some responses down in a letter to tell you about how much I appreciated your work, since I'm sure I won't have a chance to tell you all of this in person. The Help is all the rage right now, with the movie and all, and your book is somewhat like a modern day version that provides us with a similar service/critique, without the luxury of looking back on people in another time to blame, we have our own opportunity to change in response! 


In all honesty, I entered the book with skepticism. A number of ethical dilemmas troubled me as I learned about your project to pose as a low-wage worker and see if you could get by financially. I worried about your deceit of the people you'd come into contact with, and that you would presume that if you could make it, than others should be able to. But I found you humbly acknowledging your privilege of class, education, and color. As a white middle-class woman myself, figuring out how to live with my own privileges has been a major project for me, and I appreciate your modeling an honest approach to working that out.


Discussing the book prior to reading it with another woman here in Brunswick, we prepared ourselves for a real heavy downer. I was again surprised by how amazingly entertaining you could make a story about such drudgery and injustice, without cheapening the lessons learned or the experiences endured by yourself or others. My husband and I read it aloud to each other and more than once feared that we woke our sleeping baby by bursting out with uncontrollable laughter. You are so fun to read!


Your stories brought to mind a variety of people I've encountered over the years. In preparing for my Masters in Social Work, I had to attend some community college classes to cover some pre-requisites. Having been raised with lots of educational privilege, I never expected to set foot in a community college as a student, but it was necessary. I thought so highly of myself for working my full-time non-profit job AND attending multiple classes at night. It was one of the more stressful seasons of my life, juggling it all. But I sat down in that class and was confronted with a room packed with middle-aged females, most of whom had at one point been on welfare, had multiple mouths to feed, rarely had a partner helping them carry the load, held down multiple jobs, AND attended multiple classes at night. I was thoroughly humbled. They knew so much more from life experience about what I was trying to learn from books. Reading your book made me even more frustrated because I can not imagine how, on top of all you did, you could have managed to pay for and attend classes that would have enabled someone in your position to get higher paying jobs (of course, you already had your PhD). And yet, these women saw that this was their only way out, they had been told the burden was on them to get themselves and their families out of this cycle of poverty. I'll never understand how they did it.


Your book challenges me to live a life with less greed, because my own greed affects people, not just my own soul. Your book also makes me feel like one answer to this problem of class separation and repression is to live in community with people that are different from me. Instead of being paralyzed by the guilt of my privilege, I have found my most productive endeavors have involved doing life with people that are members of the working-poor, homeless, or just different classes or sub-cultures. In doing life together, we don't have to depend on welfare as it comes and goes (not that I think it needs to go), I can be the one to write that check to cover my friend's shortfall for rent this month. In doing life together, I can see what life is like in a very personal and real way. Because it is affecting my friend, I have much more reason to change how I live and find solutions to these huge problems. I have much less reason to be ungrateful for all that I have been given. We can break down some of the walls that create isolation and "pariah" syndromes and generalizations of the other that deepen the conflict and avoidance. This is perhaps the messiest, most difficult solution to the problem, but I believe it may get to the core of what is truly wrong. I thought the way you did this living-life-with another at the end of your chapter on Minnesota, when news of the strike shows up on the break room TV and you connect with the other woman there who was suffering, was truly beautiful.
 Speaking of being in relationship, doing it honestly so often requires repairs and reconciliation because it is so easy to hurt one another. I've never met you before, so we're not exactly "in relationship," but I do feel compelled to apologize to you, to seek some degree of reconciliation. One of the truest and hardest-to-swallow portrayals in your book was that of the Christians you encountered. I am a Christian and on behalf of my brothers and sisters, I need to issue you an apology.


Your critique to the participants in the tent revival was entirely on point. We, American Christians need to spend more time reading the whole Bible, and stop dodging passages like the Sermon on the Mount. We make an idol of the "god" we are comfortable worshiping, instead of serving the God that requires a much more difficult and humbling obedience. Thank you for calling us out on that problem!


Secondly, I am a horribly cheap and miserly person. I tremble to think of how many Sundays I went from church to lunch out and gave a disrespectful tip to a server, thinking I was being a good Christian "steward" of my resources. I don't know how many times I must have done that, or how many servers I've done it too. I can't apologize to those servers, but I wish I could say I am sorry being so manipulative in my understandings of theology so as to serve my own interests instead of those of the God I claim to love. Your book helped me receive the beautiful service from a waitress yesterday with so much more appreciation. Thank you. 


Lastly, I was brought to tears by the last paragraph of your afterward. You say:


"If we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions. Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. . . . But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they're down."


More than just agreeing with you, in reading those words, I heard echoes of the prophet Isaiah in one of my favorite chapters of scripture. God's people think they are being so wonderfully religious, and yet God is not granting them all the things they keep asking for from Him, and they are perplexed. In response, through Isaiah, God basically says, in old school speak, just exactly what you said. So, I am sorry we live so offensively, but thank you for speaking a truth to us that we have been needing to hear for thousands of years, a truth God's been trying to teach us. I hope you can see past us, failed image-bearers that we are, and find your joy in the Lord, just as Isaiah promised. Thank you. 


Sincerely,
Zoe Reyes


Isaiah 58:
¹ “Shout it aloud, do not hold back. 
   Raise your voice like a trumpet. 
Declare to my people their rebellion 
   and to the descendants of Jacob their sins. 
² For day after day they seek me out; 
   they seem eager to know my ways, 
as if they were a nation that does what is right 
   and has not forsaken the commands of its God. 
They ask me for just decisions 
   and seem eager for God to come near them. 
³ ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, 
   ‘and you have not seen it? 
Why have we humbled ourselves, 
   and you have not noticed?’
   “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
   and exploit all your workers. ⁴ Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
   and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
   and expect your voice to be heard on high. ⁵ Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
   only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
   and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
   a day acceptable to the LORD?
 ⁶ “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
   and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
   and break every yoke? ⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry
   and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
   and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? ⁸ Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
   and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness^[a] will go before you,
   and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. ⁹ Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
   you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
   “If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
   with the pointing finger and malicious talk, ¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
   and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
   and your night will become like the noonday. ¹¹ The LORD will guide you always;
   he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
   and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
   like a spring whose waters never fail. ¹² Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
   and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
   Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.
 ¹³ “If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
   and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
   and the LORD’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
   and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, ¹⁴ then you will find your joy in the LORD,
   and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
   and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
            For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.