Walter Mosley Read Online Free PDF Page A

year. I’m middle class if my bank officer will loan me the money for a million-dollar house. I’m middle class if I read the Wall Street Journal . I’m middle class if all my friends say that’s what they are.

    What separates the working class from the middle class? A portfolio. If a middle-class person loses her job, her investment portfolio will pay her bills, her mortgage, her child’s berth at Yale, her annual charities, and for her favorite restaurants and theater club season tickets for a year or a little more.
    If a working-class person loses her job, her lifestyle will change drastically in two to four weeks. Debt will rise like a tsunami and all the frills that she bought on credit will wash away.
    We have to be aware of these categories because that’s the only way we can identify with each other and come together in political solidarity. The gates we run into are fencing us out, not protecting us. The politicians we vote for know our net worth better than we do. And net worth, the bottom line, is our most important political value.
    Together we own the earth. Pretending that we are a part of the class above (or working toward being members of the class above) relinquishes our value to the powers that be.
    By defining our class we can accurately see ourselves on the side where we exist without falling prey to the lies of bankers, politicians, and ad men. The wealthy control absolutely everything but We the People are the true custodians of Earth.

STEP FIVE
    LEGITIMIZING PSYCHOTHERAPY IN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
    I have been in psychotherapy for well over twenty years. I started when I was in my early thirties and thoroughly lost. I had made it through college and worked my way up as a computer programmer but still I had that nagging feeling that I was in the slow lane in a perpetual interstate traffic jam.
    I got a good recommendation for a well-known master-therapist and spent a week thinking of what I would say to him. After all, what excuse did I, a mere worker, have for sitting before such a distinguished and important man?

    I knew that I was unhappy but there was no hook to hang my melancholy from, no phrase that accurately defined my malaise. I didn’t think I was depressed, obsessive, or neurotic. I wasn’t a substance abuser as I had given up tobacco and alcohol a decade before. I didn’t know why I felt so lost. Maybe there was something very wrong with me. Maybe I was teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown and didn’t know it.
    But maybe doesn’t make a baby and I don’t know doesn’t tell you why you are here. So I sat me down and tried to come up with a picture that accurately defined who I was in the world, how I saw myself, and how I was slipping backward even while everyone else seemed to be moving ahead.
    I came up with the following image:
    It feels as if everyone in the world begins at the same starting line. The starter pistol is discharged and we all move forward. Everyone else, it seems, is moving at a moderate pace of about ten miles a year while I am hurtling forward at a hundred miles a year and, at the same time, going backward at a ninety-nine-mile-a-year pace. And so at the end of every year I couldn’t say that I was stalled, after all I’d made a mile’s
progress, but everyone else was ten times further along than was I. As the years pass I fall further and further behind—exhausted by the exertion of laboring almost twenty times harder than everyone else.
    I’m not sure how the head psychotherapist interpreted my explanation but he handed me over to one of his younger associates, with whom I have been working ever since.
    This experience, this investigation of unconscious motivations for conscious acts, elated me. For the first time in my life, my life was the subject rather than how that life fit into the structures of a seemingly unreachable and capricious world.
    Over time my relationship with the