American Winter: Middle-Class Fear: Disaster Capitalism and the Threat of Poverty

[HiPointDem]

1. "Our worker self is not a subset of who we are as humans; our worker self is our self."

Many scenes in American Winter haunt me, but few as much as Brandon, reduced and broken, at the end in a scene that likely was intended as one glimmer of light in a truly dark winter for these families.

But Brandon—like many of the children in these families—personifies how disaster capitalism and consumerism have created an existence whereby our humanity is almost entirely anchored to who we are as workers. Our worker self is not a subset of who we are as humans; our worker self is our self.