the little people

I once was told by an Osage man to "never mention the little people".   Just talking about them would let them find you and that was very bad.  A Cherokee woman of pretty tough stuff told me that there was  a place in Osage County that the "little people" frequented.  She didn't go there but she was not afraid to tell me what she knew.  Neither person considered them to be a good thing.

A family I knew that was 3rd generation from Ireland was not that skittish about them, but implied that they were not cute little elves and pixies--that was Victorian-era donkey dung.

I once read that in the middle ages, land of feudal kings and bubonic plague, the merchants and landowner and nobility called the serfs and slaves and servants and farmers the "little people" and they rarely spoke of them either.

Those little people left us little about the details of their lives--perhaps if they had not been over-worked, malnourished, and illiterate they might have shared a diary or two.

The idea that over half the population of the time was considered nothing more than disposable labor horrifies me.  And being good at genealogy and capable of admitting that I am not the forgotten remnant of some royal family, I am fully aware that those people, those little people, those little, disposable, never spoken of except as extras in the theater of some important person's life drama, people, are my people.

We still have little people.  They are poor and powerless.  They are given a free education that we have known is not effective for 50% of the students since we first started following statistics.  They are given the opportunity to find a job that will barely pay for a place to live and unhealthy food in an area in which they will be surrounded with other little people that can barely pay their bills.  They will be victimized by those that just keep hunting for a way to make enough money to get out of there (we call those "get rich quick" schemes, and call the perpetrators predators, but they are really just more little people that are flailing about trying to figure out how to be the star of their own life drama instead of an extra till they die.)

What does it mean to be a little person?  Well most can write now, though not necessarily well. And while slavery was ended by an amendment--one with a huge hole in it for those that have committed a crime--hence forced labor for convicts is not an infringement on their rights as the constitution stands now--but how does one without money live free.

You can't live off the land unless you own land and have the money to pay the property taxes.  A person who tries to live unimpaired by their own lack of cash is either a squatter or homeless.  Camping on park land or federal land without having paid and received permission is not acceptable.  You will be removed.  You will be subject to fines or imprisonment.

So instead we have debt-slaves.  People that want the "good-life", that have bought the American Dream;  that believe all those sitcoms with middle class people living in 4000 square feet houses while working as a laborer, or a low-level white collar worker while supporting a spouse and 10 kids that have every hot toy and all the latest fashion accessories.  They believe that we are all equally able to go from struggling to feed ourselves to living in a mansion with just a little hard work and perseverance.

They believe, shoot, I believe--it's what keeps me going-- there is some hope that the payday to payday juggling act and always looking for the best sale and never wasting money on fads and fun will eventually end.  And it will, because eventually we all die.

I heard that Capitalism was actually not the way of things until starting in the mid 1700's.  Before that, we little people were working for the rich.  We were at their mercy.  They decided what we got.  They decided when and if we had free time or could marry or could move somewhere else or change careers.  The rich,  the landowners and nobility, they already owned everything and the little people were like their personal army of laborers, and craftsmen and personal servants.  In the bigger cities, there were those that led less slave-like positions, frequently as beggars or working for the town as removers of the dead, rag pickers, junk collectors, handyman or baker's helper or what ever could be found working for one of the merchants.  The merchant class was neither as respected nor as wealthy as the landowners, but trade was becoming more important for those items desired that couldn't be grown or made by the local little people.

And capitalism begins.

So no, we weren't better before it.  But there is no reason to think that the acquisition of money is the best we humans can do.

The inclusions in our government's basic tenets about equality and opportunity are a sign that better things were desired.

The fact that 200 years after they were first mentioned we still haven't gotten past a division of the important people and the little people just shows how hard it is to make real progress as long those in power fear only being equal.

A teacher once told me the problem with egalitarianism was that while the bottom rises, the top drops down.  We would no longer have people with 60 summer homes or garages for their 50 collector cars.
And we would no longer have people dying of preventable illness while sleeping in a cardboard box.  Apparently having too much is much more important than millions of people with too little.

Money needs to quit being the scorecard for successful living.

We are all just people.  All the same size.  All the same importance.

We little people are not really scary.