Joel crawls all over the place now. He can even make it up the staircase (the big one, in addition to this "practice step").

I have been working on the dissertation a lot (there is a lot of difficult wording to change still). Anne made delicious tofu (before this, we were not sure tofu could be this good).

There was another door-to-door salesman, this time he was from "Go-Doers" of Washington D.C. (which I learned is a for-profit company). He made me feel awful to live where I do. "Alan" had obviously sold his soul to do whatever he could to make high-pressure magazine sales. He gave a stereotypical inner-city sob story (single father with three kids). He came into our neighborhood, asked what the "secret to our success" is (to try to flatter us into thinking that we have earned this life). Then he gave his story and told us how this company has him earn "points" for magazine sales (best I can tell, he needs to sell several hundred overpriced subscriptions). In the "sales pressure" moment, he made jokes and comments that made me embarrassed to be a human. He obviously had a sales strategy of stereotyping everyone in the neighborhood as a class-insensitive jerk. He said that this program lets him get off welfare and "you don't like paying taxes to support welfare, right?." That was awkward to hear a poor person (who also claimed to be on welfare) say. It was not the place for a political discussion, but I now wish I would have called him on that and let him know that there IS compassion in this neighborhood. He then made a Clinton joke...to show us what, that he is a Republican? What kind of fool would he have to be? I am offended that his experience shows him that such simple-minded tactics will work in my neighborhood. Do my neighbors really believe that junk? Do they really mentally justify having a middle-class lifestyle when there is poverty in the US by thinking of a protoytypical poor black man "pulling himself up by his bootstraps" and thus feeling as if they NEED to support this embodiment of everything that Rush Limbaugh said could happen in America?
I would hope that there is compassion and intelligence enough to say that "I got here because I was born into a good position, you are where you are because you were not born into a good position." I certainly felt dirty after he left. I don't know how I can feel less dirty. Maybe I SHOULD feel dirty. Afterall, what am I doing to strike at real poverty--I live in a suburban dream house. Maybe I will just turn a blind eye, create justifications that make little sense in reality and start handing out money to the only black people who may ever be in my neighborhood so I can justify the idea that the American dream is equally available to all people.