A Quote by Philippe Cousteau, Jr.
I've been on my grandfather's boat, Calypso, twice in my life. My mother raised me in a pretty typical middle-class life.
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I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.
I had a constant fascination with the darkside. It is another world, bordering on insanity, and demonic possession, or what I thought was my own Soul Bending personal nirvana. Its good to be back in the middle of the boat, instead of hanging on for dear life in the last life boat.
I went to elementary school in L.A. I was born in L.A. My mother was from Redondo Beach. My father was French. He died six months before I was born, so my mother went home. I was born there. Not the childhood that most people think. Middle-class, raised by my mother. Single mom.
As a child I used to watch clouds, and in them, see faces, castles, animals, dragons, and giants. It was a world of escape--fantasy; something to inject wonder and adventure into the mundane, regulated life of a middle-class boy leading a middle-class life.
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.
My dad's a bodybuilder. My whole life I've been taught to train the hard way. I believe in earning strength, not buying it. My grandfather raised me old school: In baseball, you work for whatever you get.
One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
I think you will find me to be a typical middle-class American.
I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.
The size of the U.S. middle class has been shrinking. Wages have been stagnant. We don't have those factory jobs that paid a living wage and enabled a family to have a home where the wife did not have to work. But we sent our factories abroad and there is no likelihood of getting them back. Equally worrisome is that some managerial jobs and professional jobs (such as lawyers) which support middle class life are threatened by automation.
My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin. My mother was very religious and went to church twice a day. My grandmother was Armenian. So I was raised with three different faiths - that's why I am so open.
Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.
Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.
My brother and late sister and I were raised in Detroit; it was where the middle class across racial lines, the middle class was able to develop, build a home, have for the first time retirement benefits, have a job, and yes, their kids began to go to college.
The street I lived on for the first handful of years of my life was lined with modest, lower-middle-class houses with small front yards and cracked driveways - your typical North Jersey neighborhood, with all the odd hidden darkness that that implies.
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