Farewells: Fear of Falling, Failing

There are some weeks where no one dies.  Then there are the weeks where I feel like I should note significant passings.  Happily, so far, no one I know personally has died.  

I was working on seminary studies earlier this week when the news broke of Mikhail Gorbachev's death.  I thought about how young he was, and then I thought, no, wait, he was young decades ago.  I was a bit stunned to read that he was in his 90's.  I remember when he came to power after a string of elderly Soviet leaders died one after another during my undergraduate days.  I thought about how he might be in power for much of the rest of my lifetime, like Stalin.  As the months and years went on, I wasn't sure how to process his approach to governing.

Me and lots of other people and maybe Gorbachev himself.  In the days that followed his death, many people wrote about him, but my favorite is this article by Anne Applebaum, which includes this gem:  "Almost nobody in history has ever had such a profound impact on his era, while at the same time understanding so little about it."

Barbara Ehrenreich, on the other hand, had a vast knowledge of  the history of our time, and her writing helped us understand it too.  I became aware of her work in the mid 80's when I read the 1970's writing that she did with Deirdre English on the subject of the history of women's health.  When I was in grad school, I got a used copy of Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class.  I thought that the insights that she had about women's fear of poverty was also applicable to grad students.

Of course it was her work that became Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America that gained her a larger audience.  I remember reading an earlier version that was a magazine article in Harper's.  I read in a college library where I waited to interview for an adjunct position that I didn't get.  I remember thinking about how many low wage jobs existed that I knew very little about--happily, Ehrenreich was there to show us the way.

I was lucky enough to get to see her in 2009 when she came to Books and Books.  I wrote this blog post about it.  She was charming and gracious and so, so funny.

I think about her work and how I once thought that her undercover work as a low wage worker might lead to lasting social change for those on the lower rungs.  So far, it has not.  I think about Gorbachev and how the fall of the Soviet Union both led to more freedom for many nations, but also to Putin's reactions to his feelings of shame/distress/anger at how his nation fell.  I am thinking of unintended consequences and the work still left to be done.