[twitter]
Ben Ehrenreich
@BenEhrenreich
Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September 1,
a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go.
She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory
by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.

https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1565753750752575493
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

In article <Pine.NEB.4.64.2209022053280.29162@panix2.panix.com>, danny
burstein <dannyb@panix.com> wrote:

> [twitter]
> Ben Ehrenreich
> @BenEhrenreich
> Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September 1,
> a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go.
> She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory
> by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.
>
> https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1565753750752575493

I'm sorry, danny.

On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 5:38:15 PM UTC-4, A Friend wrote:
> In article <Pine.NEB.4.64.22...@panix2.panix.com>, danny
> burstein <dan...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> > [twitter]
> > Ben Ehrenreich
> > @BenEhrenreich
> > Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September 1,
> > a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go.
> > She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory
> > by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.
> >
> > https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1565753750752575493
> I'm sorry, danny.

Why are you sorry for Danny? He was posting Ben Ehrenreich's tweet about HIS mother.

On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 5:38:15 PM UTC-4, A Friend wrote:
> danny burstein wrote:
>
> > [twitter]
> > Ben Ehrenreich
> > @BenEhrenreich
> > Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September 1,
> > a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go.
> > She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory
> > by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.
> >
> > https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1565753750752575493
> I'm sorry, danny.

Um, I made that mistake too, for a couple of seconds - and then I read it again.

But I'm sorry to hear it. (I just heard from the PBS NewsHour.)

I met her some years ago, when she was reading from her book: "Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything."

I remember that she said: "if there is a god, he is not a benevolent god."

And her books are great. She was likely best known for her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America."

https://www.southingtonschools.org/uploaded/faculty/bhosmer@southingtonschoolsorg/English/summer_reading_2020/Grade_12/Grade_12_-_AP_Language_Required_Text-Nickel_and_Dimed_by_Barbara_Ehrenreich.pdf

From the back cover:

"Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job - any job - could be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered as a woefully inexperienced homemaker returning to the workforce. So began a grueling, hair raising, and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly 'unskilled,' that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors."

From the introduction:

"If there were other, subtler things different about me, no one ever pointed them out.
Certainly I made no effort to play a role or fit into some imaginative stereotype of
low-wage working women. I wore my usual clothes, wherever ordinary clothes were
permitted, and my usual hairstyle and makeup. In conversations with coworkers, I talked
about my real children, marital status, and relationships; there was no reason to invent a
whole new life. I did modify my vocabulary, however, in one respect: at least when I was
new at a job and worried about seeming brash or disrespectful, I censored the profanities
that are - thanks largely to the Teamster influence - part of my normal speech. Other than
that, I joked and teased, offered opinions, speculations, and, incidentally, a great deal of
health-related advice, exactly as I would do in any other setting.

"Several times since completing this project I have been asked by acquaintances whether
the people I worked with couldn't, uh, TELL - the supposition being that an educated person
is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones. I
wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in
some enviable way - more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most.
But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me 'special'
was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more
homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less
likely to be funny or bright. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought
to broaden their circle of friends."

And, from her 1989 essay "Drug Frenzy" (in the book "The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed":

"Alcohol is the drug that undid my parents. When my own children reached the age of
exploration, I said all the usual things like 'no.' I further told them that reality, if carefully
attended to, is more exotic than its chemically induced variations. But I also said that, if
they still felt they had to get involved with a drug, I'd rather it was pot than Bud."

(This is even more poignant when you read, in her introduction to that book, that she describes her father, before he developed Alzheimer's, as "the smartest man on earth." In Wikipedia, it says (his name was Ben Howes Alexander): "Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana School of Mines (renamed Montana Technological University since 2018), and then to Carnegie Mellon University. He eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation.")

That same essay was reprinted in the 1990 book "War on Drugs: Opposing Viewpoints."

If you like, here's more on her father (from the 1980s):

"One of the first questions in a test of mental competency is 'Who is the president of the United States?' Even deep into the indignities of Alzheimer's disease, my father always did well on that one. His blue eyes would widen incredulously, surprised at the neurologist's ignorance, then he would snort in majestic indignation, 'Reagan, that dumb son of a bitch.' It seemed to me a good deal — two people tested for the price of one."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/books/barbara-ehrenreich-dead.html

....Ms. Ehrenreich, the journalist, activist and author, died at 81 on Thursday at a hospice facility in Alexandria, Va., where she also had a home. Her daughter, Rosa Brooks, said the cause was a stroke.

....One of more than 20 books written by Ms. Ehrenreich, “Nickel and Dimed” bolstered the movement for higher wages just as the consequences of the dot-com bubble snaked through the economy in 2001.

“Many people praised me for my bravery for having done this — to which I could only say: Millions of people do this kind of work every day for their entire lives — haven’t you noticed them?” she said in 2018 in an acceptance speech after receiving the Erasmus Prize, given to a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to the humanities, the social sciences or the arts.

....In 2018, she published “Natural Causes,” which addressed the topic of growing old and bluntly excoriated the wellness movement.

“Every death can now be understood as suicide,” she wrote. “We persist in subjecting anyone who dies at a seemingly untimely age to a kind of bio-moral autopsy: Did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat too much fat and not enough fiber? Can she, in other words, be blamed for her own death?”

Ms. Ehrenreich continued writing into her 80s and at her death had begun work on a book about the evolution of narcissism, her daughter said.

Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world.

“The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us,” she told The New Yorker, “but that we will die trying.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/02/barbara-ehrenreich-author-dies-nickel-and-dimed

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2022-09-02/barbara-ehrenreich-dead

....She also said she was born and raised into atheism “by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons.” She was a student activist who was educated as a scientist — studying physics at Reed College and earned a PhD in 1968 from Rockefeller University in cellular biology — but she trained as a teacher and reporter and didn’t believe what she couldn’t see...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/barbara-ehrenreich-nickel-dimed-author-activist-dies-81-rcna46150

https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/nickel-and-dimed-author-barbara-ehrenreich-dead-at-81.html
(you can see photos of her two children here)

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/barbara-ehrenreich-myth-busting-writer-and-activist-dies-at-81/

....The birth of her daughter Rosa helped inspired her to become a feminist, she later explained, because she was appalled at the hospital's treatment of patients. Her battle with breast cancer years ago inspired her 2009 book “Bright-Sided,” in which she recalled the bland platitudes and assurances of well wishers and probed the American insistence — a religion, she called it — on optimism, to the point of ignoring the country's many troubles.

“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking," she wrote.

“Positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy. If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility.”

And, from 1985 (this appeared in "The Worst Years of Our Lives"):

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/17/garden/hers.html

First two-thirds:

"Food Worship"

Ethiopia reminds us that there are still people for whom food is primarily a means to biological survival. Here, to judge from the rapid conversion of real estate into takeout shops for gourmets and the sudden prominence of vegetables that begin with the letter A, food has come to mean much more: status, authority, entertainment, style, possibly religion. Among the upscale, trend-setting people who are held up for our admiration in commercials for credit cards and wine coolers, food appears to be more fascinating than either sex or trivia games. An evening on the town, which used to mean dinner and a show, now means a showy dinner, followed perhaps by a chaste gelato..

In fact, in anticipation of the time when food will have surpassed all other ingredients of high culture and when upward mobility will hinge on a mastery of puff pastry rather than a familiarity with computers or great books, I am thinking of substituting food emporiums for museums on my children's Sunday outings. Already, food has gained an equal footing with fashion and skin care in the men's magazines, driven diet books to the remainder shelves, and - as food history, food criticism, etc. - gained a foothold in academia. Those areas of artistic and intellectual endeavor that wish to survive may have to take up food themes or be content to make the same kind of accommodation to the restaurant that music has made to the piano bar.

As a longtime admirer of foods that outrank me in social status, I am not complaining. Thanks to the food fixation of the upwardly mobile, pita bread and salad bars have sedimented down to Burger King, suggesting that cold poached salmon may not be far behind. And I will admit to having occasionally dined - on other people's expense accounts - at establishments so tony that the dishes are reportedly rinsed in Perrier and the beef has graduated from stress-free, organic grazing environments. So it is without envy or ingratitude that I have been wondering, why food? Why food of all the obsessions - sex, astrology, real estate, tropical bird breeding - available to those in the Gold Card bracket?

The first explanation I have come up with is a straightforward biological one. Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat cheese and wind up, hours later, with raspberries cushioned on a lascivious creme a l'anglaise get up at dawn to run, break for a midmorning aerobics class and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.

This explanation assumes that past generations of dieters - the mothers and grandmothers of today's big-time eaters - left a large proportion of our contemporaries genetically imprinted with a hunger of deep and savage proportions. After having been teased for so long with grapefruit halves and celery sticks, this vast hunger quite justifiably demands plates heaping with Tex-Mex, three- course lunches and between-meal pasta primavera pick-me-ups. Paradoxically, of course, the very occupations that pay well enough to finance gastronomic intake on such a scale - corporate law, international banking, cocaine retailing - involve almost zero energy expenditures in the course of a day's work. Hence the wild aerobic flailings and desperate five-mile runs required to maintain a fast-track metabolism. Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

Not to push this theory too far, you might say that exercise is to eating in the 80's as contraception was to sex in the 60's. The pill, IUD's and eventually legalized abortion freed sex from its ancient biological consequences and helped usher in the sexual revolution. In the same way, jogging, jazzercize and Jane Fonda's videotape have uncoupled gluttony from obesity and thus made possible what may someday be called the gastrointestinal revolution.

But hunger, revived hourly by workouts and runs, only explains why people eat, not what they eat. People who are merely hungry have been known to eat almost anything - bologna sandwiches, bowls of millet, unripe Brie. Something larger than hunger sends young account executives rushing out of their condos after dark to pick up an extra bottle of walnut oil or raspberry vinegar. And that can only be the drive to impress, intimidate and inspire insecurity in one's dinner guests...

(snip)

Lenona <lenona321@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 5:38:15 PM UTC-4, A Friend wrote:
>> danny burstein wrote:
>>
>> > [twitter]
>> > Ben Ehrenreich
>> > @BenEhrenreich
>> > Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September 1,
>> > a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go.
>> > She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory
>> > by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.
>> >
>> > https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1565753750752575493
>> I'm sorry, danny.
>
>
> Um, I made that mistake too, for a couple of seconds - and then I read it again.
>
> But I'm sorry to hear it. (I just heard from the PBS NewsHour.)
>
> I met her some years ago, when she was reading from her book: "Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything."
>
> I remember that she said: "if there is a god, he is not a benevolent god."
>
> And her books are great. She was likely best known for her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America."
>
> https://www.southingtonschools.org/uploaded/faculty/bhosmer@southingtonschoolsorg/English/summer_reading_2020/Grade_12/Grade_12_-_AP_Language_Required_Text-Nickel_and_Dimed_by_Barbara_Ehrenreich.pdf
>
> From the back cover:
>
> "Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job - any job - could be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered as a woefully inexperienced homemaker returning to the workforce. So began a grueling, hair raising, and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly 'unskilled,' that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors."

Aha,the book Adam Shepard's "Scratch Beginnings" was designed to rebut.

> From the introduction:
>
> "If there were other, subtler things different about me, no one ever pointed them out.
> Certainly I made no effort to play a role or fit into some imaginative stereotype of
> low-wage working women. I wore my usual clothes, wherever ordinary clothes were
> permitted, and my usual hairstyle and makeup. In conversations with coworkers, I talked
> about my real children, marital status, and relationships; there was no reason to invent a
> whole new life. I did modify my vocabulary, however, in one respect: at least when I was
> new at a job and worried about seeming brash or disrespectful, I censored the profanities
> that are - thanks largely to the Teamster influence - part of my normal speech. Other than
> that, I joked and teased, offered opinions, speculations, and, incidentally, a great deal of
> health-related advice, exactly as I would do in any other setting.
>
> "Several times since completing this project I have been asked by acquaintances whether
> the people I worked with couldn't, uh, TELL - the supposition being that an educated person
> is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones. I
> wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in
> some enviable way - more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most.
> But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me 'special'
> was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more
> homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less
> likely to be funny or bright. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought
> to broaden their circle of friends."

I have to wonder how much of his being a man and her being a woman played a role in
her experiences being different from Shepard's.

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.

Lenona <lenona321@yahoo.com> wrote:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/books/barbara-ehrenreich-dead.html
>
> ...Ms. Ehrenreich, the journalist, activist and author, died at 81 on Thursday at a hospice facility in Alexandria, Va., where she also had a home. Her daughter, Rosa Brooks, said the cause was a stroke.
>
> ...One of more than 20 books written by Ms. Ehrenreich, ?Nickel and Dimed? bolstered the movement for higher wages just as the consequences of the dot-com bubble snaked through the economy in 2001.

Bolstered or unbolstered,the movement has not brought about an increase in the federal minimum since 2009,when the last of three 70-cent-an-hour increments
that are the only changes since 1997 took effect.

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.

In article <4d0aa352-4d12-4c16-b3f6-a061e89adb17n@googlegroups.com>,
Diner <bwaystars@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, September 2, 2022 at 5:38:15 PM UTC-4, A Friend wrote:
> > In article <Pine.NEB.4.64.22...@panix2.panix.com>, danny
> > burstein <dan...@panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > > [twitter]
> > > Ben Ehrenreich
> > > @BenEhrenreich
> > > Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September
> > > 1,
> > > a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go.
> > > She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory
> > > by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.
> > >
> > > https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1565753750752575493
> > I'm sorry, danny.
>
> Why are you sorry for Danny? He was posting Ben Ehrenreich's tweet
> about HIS mother.

I misread it. Simple mistake.