Happy in the Middle

I am a middle class American. Somewhere between a Ford Focus and an Chevy Impala. It’s my identity, my bias, and yes, my preference. I don’t want to be poor because homelessness and hunger feel like components of an unpleasant lifestyle; they scare me. I don’t want to possess great wealth because I’ve done nothing to deserve it, and so I would feel guilty.

I understand the middle class, have lived among us my whole life. I know us, our hopes and fears, aspirations and anxieties, frustrations and fulfillments. I know why a parent from Philly drives spouse and kids 350 miles to get in a long thin line of cars to Duck, NC, where we spend our sole one-week vacation in a big wooden house on the Outer Banks, and I know that this cannot be explained to someone who did not grow up middle class.

Middle class people are likeable, most of us. We take the middle part very seriously. We remember all the times we got so drunk we blacked out, because there weren’t too many. We know we got taken as often as we haggled out a fantastic deal. We brag only about the latter. If we overindulge our children, we know it, defend it, and regret it. Same when we are too strict. Behind us we leave a lifelong litter trail of abandoned resolutions: to exercise and lose weight; to read more and watch TV less; to finally give that rock band a try. So we remain a bit overfed and under-read; the guitar maintains its lonesome niche in the attic.

The best thing about my fellow middle classians, however, is our savory take on this journey we call life. Like the stuff we can’t help. We can’t help loving our spouse and our children, can’t imagine a better place to be than in the stands when our kid’s soccer team is playing. If we can’t make the game, we can’t help thinking about the fact that we’re missing it. Once there, we are truly embarrassed when we cheer too loudly, but the lesson seldom carries over to the next game.

Our first reaction to intolerance is a gentle admonition to live and let live. We are incensed by adults who are OK with being unemployed, by parents who are OK with being absent, by diners who treat waiters like servants. We’d be thrilled to win the big lottery, just like everyone else, but we don’t live our lives as if such a thing will ever really happen.

Some very clever author once wrote of this group that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. The esteemed thinker got it very wrong, mistaking desperate moments, moments of sadness and moments of regret as the sum of a lifetime. He somehow missed the ecstasy of the first look at a yowling new daughter, the devoted application of time and talent to a job that feeds a family and contributes to wealth, the pursuit of happiness of dependents over self, and the hundred thousand helping hands extended over a lifetime of inability to ignore a person in need. I think the clever writer mistook our quiet lives as desperate rather than merely uncomplaining.

Not to mention boring, which we certainly are. Gosh, when a movie producer wants to shoot a flick in one of our suburban tracts, he has to plant at least seven or eight psychopaths among our neighbors just to get the plot underway. Otherwise, cinemagoers would be sitting through two hours and change of relatively happy, faithful, sane folk backing out of driveways and off to classrooms, to workplace cubicles, to the aisles of supermarkets. Who wouldn’t cry out for Freddy Kruger, Edward Cullen, Jason, and Carrie and a few barrels of blood after forty minutes of that? Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer has done the cause of wakefulness in suburbia a distinct service.

Not that we set out to be boring. We just don’t spend time trying to figure out how to be interesting or fascinating, at least not once we’ve snagged a mate. I guess we find ourselves less involved in interesting matters than upper class or lower class people. I don’t know, because middle classians are the least class conscious of all the classes. The uppers, especially the newly upper, seem to have developed a competitive need to maintain and enhance upperness. It turns them into folks with an interest in being interesting.

Real big time uppers appear to go one of two ways, both interesting, only one attractive. The attractive one is modeled by folks like Bill and Melinda Gates, whose wealth is a direct result of giving several billion people things those people are happy to pay for. Their more recent penchant for giving large wads of that money back to kids who need educating and adults who need healing has made Mr. and Mrs. Gates all the more appealing.

Paris Hilton and Donald Trump embody the other upper. Her life swim leaves a wake that puts the obscene in obscenely wealthy, while his relentless quest for TV face time speaks of something novel: unquiet desperation. For the life of us, we middles cannot fathom her need to get so drunk so often, his need for his face and his name to be seen so often. We have to believe there are thrills she can afford that do not require the brain squishing aid of ten cosmos. Both of them seem to have a sincere loathing for people less rich or less camera-worthy than they.

And now, already, I feel guilty. Who am I to berate Paris or The Donald? They could be going through difficulties I can’t even imagine. If they wanted to be left alone, we middles would be the first ones to oblige them, even though People Magazine would have you believe differently.

Don’t get me wrong. They are both interesting in an uninteresting sort of way. You know, like a really good plate spinner at a circus or a really bad movie. I mean, have you seen “Plan 9 From Outer Space”? They really do use an old shower curtain to separate a commercial pilot from the “rest” of the plane. Come on!

Which leads to the more serious middle class lapses. While a superficial fascination with inexplicable celebrity is mostly harmless, we are not at our best when we seek such things for ourselves or our children. Our competitiveness can take on an unpleasant, even mean quality.

Also, we are sometimes too subject to fear. It can drive out compassion and tolerance, virtues we normally prize deeply. We then require direction. When those poor Amish girls were murdered in their tiny schoolhouse, our righteous, fear-driven rage was righted by the Spirit-driven response within the Amish community who sought to heal through forgiveness rather than “bring closure” through vengeance.

As we confront the specters of violent extremism, suicidal child killers, and insufficiently regulated immigration, we search for the best that is within us knowing that fear will shrink our hearts and close our minds and block our vision. It is no accident that some are clamoring for higher walls and deadlier guns.

Yes, we are at our worst when our valor fails and our fears rule. Luckily, we are usually able to call on reserves of courage and venture once again into an uncertain world but a world with slightly more hope in it than despair, more love than hate, more joy than anguish, more laughter than tears. More good than evil.

Not a lot more good than evil. Just more. But to us middles, that make all the difference.