Coontz and Currie

The two articles for this week worked well together to explore the factors that have led to the individualistic climate of how our society interacts with class issues. Both Currie and Coontz actively work to undermine the importance and value of individualism within our social support system. While I felt they counter-acted each other in some ways, the combination of the two pieces helped strengthen the ideas I took from the two.

Usually when I read articles together, I look at one as the ‘supporting’ article – one whose main, sometimes only, purpose is to lay the groundwork for the second. However, with Coontz and Currie, the issues are tied together closely. Coontz’s piece, “We Always Stood on Our Own Two Feet: Self-reliance and the American Family,” acts to explain how the myth of Individualism has been cultivated, and then discredits the evidence offered in support. When Currie picks up the idea, focusing on the late 80s, the effects of Individualism are now apparent. Initially, I felt the articles conflicted – Coontz’s article is specifically calling away from the romanticizing of past generation’s stability, mobility, and ability to grasp the ‘American Dream,’ while Currie’s continuously calls back to ‘better days’ before the deindustrialization of our economy. After re-reading, I understand that Currie was trying to discuss the lack of growth and adaptation of the resources and support offered. However, we often forget that government support comes in forms beyond the SNAP program and unemployment. I think without the Coontz article to juxtapose, I would have viewed the Currie piece differently – that as the economic climate changed, we needed to create government assistance, not adapt the government assistance programs that, as Currie explains, helped past generations with issues similar to ours now.

I will say that I had issues with the way in which Currie discusses class issues. I felt that he attempted to use class as an equalizer of oppression.  While he does mention that the effect was worse for minorities, it was the ‘young white male’ that he really seemed to feel the need to save – as if the downfall of the white male was the way in which to gauge the downfall of our society. I think it’s important, if we’re going to discuss the influences that led us here, to wonder why this wasn’t a crisis until it stopped effecting ‘just’ minorities.

“We know that social and economic deprivation and a sense of exclusion from the “good life” breed drug abuse; but we have consciously chosen policies that have spread and deepened poverty and widened the gap between the deprived and affluent.” (Currie, 366)

Not only did we choose policies that deepened poverty, we chose not to enact policies to help the people who have lacked mobility for multiple decades. If we are going to compare the economic situations of one generation to the other, isn’t discussing the ‘downfall’ of one group by comparing it to the long-standing inequality of another degrading and ignoring the strife of the initial group?