Middle Class Thoughts

I just went upstairs to change clothes; I’m going to mow the lawn.

When I came down, my son had paused the Cubs game so that he could go to the bathroom.

My son is 5.

When I was 5 I didn’t have cable, couldn’t watch Cubs games and certainly had to wait until they changed sides to take a leak.

I think life is like baseball. Which makes it pretty hard to day that we don’t have it way WAY better today than we did 37 years ago.

9 responses to “Middle Class Thoughts

  1. Yes, my 5 and 8 year old sons are so used to pausing TV, DVR’ing their shows and now being able to google whatever they want, it really is a different world! But I still like memories of listening to Minnesota Twins games on the radio, hearing the deep description by the announcers as I kept score at home. Looking back, I think I enjoyed following baseball by radio as much as any could enjoy it now via TV.

    • I remember watching the Twins in the ’91 Series on TV, but we had the radio on for the play by play. The radio announcers (John Gordon and Dick Bremer, I believe) put so much more color in the game.

      Oh, and 1991? Best. Series. Ever.

      • I think it was Vin Scully and Johnny Bench…oh wait, Gordon and Bremer would be the Twin Cities team, right? I was in Berlin working on my dissertation and managed to find the game on Armed Forces Radio with Scully and Bench. It was amazing sitting up until the wee hours of the morning focused on such a fantastic series!

  2. But I still like memories of listening to Minnesota Twins games on the radio, hearing the deep description by the announcers as I kept score at home.

    ‘CCO was great!

    I actually like listening to the game over the net and watching the pitch by pitch on the Internet. I love the stats

    I remember watching the Twins in the ’91 Series

    I remember tending bar during that series. Great college bar, maybe you’ve heard of it: The Foxfire.

    The bar was full of Twins fans, I was in Minnesota at the time. We had one Braves fan up front taunting and cheering during that one blow-out game. I told him if he continued to pull for the Braves, I’d throw him out.

    He did.
    I did.

    Heh heh.

  3. We’ve had a DVR for sometime. 10 years ago we often would go to relative’s homes who didn’t have one. My daughter at age 5 couldn’t get not being able to pause a live event.

    • One of the most fascinating (and in a way, scary) things I’ve seen recently is my three year old nephew navigating an iPad to get to his favorite book. Just imagine the incredible things that generation is going to bring to our society in terms of gains in medical, technical, and other fields if we don’t screw it all up for them first! 🙂

      • Just imagine the incredible things that generation is going to bring to our society in terms of gains in medical, technical, and other fields if we don’t screw it all up for them first! 🙂

        I can’t wait for the next 20 years.

  4. The point of Pino’s post was that the “Middle Class” is all around us. Your neighbor may be struggling to pay the bills, yet he still has access to technology that the wealthiest Americans could barely afford fifty years ago.
    Let’s play a game of “What Would It Cost”. Imagine it is 1962; you want to buy a copy of 101 Dalmatians as a birthday present for your daughter. How many hours would you need to work in 1962 to earn enough to purchase a copy of that entire movie? DVDs of current releases are under $30 now. That is about four hours at minimum wage.

    • Your neighbor may be struggling to pay the bills, yet he still has access to technology that the wealthiest Americans could barely afford fifty years ago.

      More and more I”m convinced that folks don’t know what middle class is. While I think that most of America’s wealthy still feels they are middle class, I think that more and more American’s qualify.

      I think the term, “Middle Class” refers to a dream. The ability to live a comfortable life with real hope of escaping bone crushing poverty. Virtually every American is there.

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