Sublime

I didn’t understand, then, that having extra at the end of the month to spend on pastries and wine is not the same as having a mother who can retire. One was a matter of hundreds, and the other was thousands.

A white girl with certain privileges learns that although she is seen as being worthy of protection and holding importance as a future wife and mother, she is supposed to be content with this and never ask for more. Her ambition in life is supported so long as it contributes to the ultimate goal of marriage and mothering. She is not in any explicit

Olivia hears her mother yell something about paying for her own education. People mill around her. She feels their anxiety—the moving goal line of hunger. Her own life had been a haze of privilege, narcissism, and impossibly extended adolescence, filled with mean, sardonic hipness and self-protection. Now she has been called.

I dream of a world in which no child suffers for our country’s greed.

Even as more and more of us are shopping according to our values, economic justice does not seem to be among our top priorities. We know if our vegetables are local and organic, but we don’t ask what the farmworkers made picking them. When we purchase a plane ticket, we are shown the carbon emissions for the flight, but we aren’t told if the flight

“I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves… I have trouble making certain connections. I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.”

Commission kept shoddy or dangerous consumer goods off the shelves. I was a longtime admirer of Warren’s work, dating back to the 2003 publication of her book The Two-Income Trap, in which Warren and her coauthor, Amelia Tyagi, provided an incisive and passionate description of the growing pressures facing working families with children.