Work had been a passport out of fear, poverty, and humiliation for her father and others a generation back. But Janice doesn’t base her own sense of honor or that of others just on money. She doesn’t base it on how gifted she is in her work, or whether her job makes for a better world—at least, none of this comes up. If people work as hard as she does, it is a better world. Her feeling about work is part of a larger moral code that shapes her feelings about those ahead and behind her in line for the American Dream. “Hard” is the important idea. More than aptitude, reward, or consequence, hard
Work had been a passport out of fear, poverty, and humiliation for her father and others a generation back. But Janice doesn’t base her own sense of honor or that of others just on money. She doesn’t base it on how gifted she is in her work, or whether her job makes for a better world—at least, none of this comes up. If people work as hard as she does, it is a better world. Her feeling about work is part of a larger moral code that shapes her feelings about those ahead and behind her in line for the American Dream. “Hard” is the important idea. More than aptitude, reward, or consequence, hard work confers honor. It comes with clean living and being churched. Those getting ahead of her in line don’t share these beliefs, she feels. Liberals—those associated with the social movements that brought in the line cutters—share a looser, less defined moral code, she feels. Liberals don’t give personal morality itself its full due, probably because they aren’t churched. Janice opposes abortion except under certain circumstances, but imagines there are “fifty million abortions a year, probably all Democrats.” (She pauses for a moment of dark humor: “Maybe I should rethink that position.”) With Supreme Court approval of gay marriage, with federal welfare for the idle, with fewer Americans “churched,” with the PC amnesia concerning the heroism of the young boys who died for the South (however misguided the Confederate cause), her piece of America seems like a small, brave holdout again...
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...st a national tide. The American Dream itself has become strange, un-Bibled, hyper-materialized, and lacking in honor. Even as she stands patiently in line, she is being made to feel a stranger in her own land. The only holdout for the better aspects of the past is the Republican Party.
