I wrote this article that was published first at Blogcritics.

I was in a fancy restaurant today and got excellent service from a young woman in her early twenties. She was exceptionally nice and as she served us I couldn’t help but think about the class system in the old days of England before America began — the times when it was impossible to move out of your social class. If you were born low, you stayed low; the same with the middle and upper classes. It’s always been kind of funny to me because in body and mind, we’re all the same.

I didn’t see the waitress’s social class as any different than mine. Should I have? In some ways it seems we have come full circle to those days. Dumb luck on a TV reality show or a winning lottery ticket can make all the difference in class nowadays. After thinking about it a bit, I realized very quickly there are still three classes that keep people “stuck.” Could it be that the challenge coins of caste status are back in America? Let me explain.

First, there are “American royalty” folks. These are the Gwen Stefanis who grew up in American middle class neighborhoods, became exorbitantly successful, and now can’t walk through a mall without being mobbed. Shows like Extra and ET propogate their regalia to the minions and events like the Academy Awards transform them into virtual deities.

Next there are the middle class peeps. This is my target audience on my blog. Why? Because they’re most like me. The middle class is an array of folks such as: your child’s teacher, the policeman that wrote you a ticket, the manager of the restaurant you just ate at, the gamut runs long. As a general rule, this class longs to “make it big.”

Many “middle classers” are hoping to write the great American novel, invent something, have the next raved-about blog, hit it big with singing skills as the lovely Gwen has, or any manner of instant catapults out of the middle zone. The shelves at Barnes and Noble tell the story well with titles like How to Write Your Hit Novel In 30 Days, or How to Make It in the Music Business, or Think Big, Live Rich. The middle class pays its hard-earned money for dreams like these and they line up to buy them like Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches paying Sylvester McMonkey McBean. What is this saying about us? Are we as a class feeling stuck in the middle?

Finally, there’s the lower class crew. These people sell flowers at red lights on Valentine’s Day (at damn good prices I might add). They pick our fruit. They clean our houses, collect our garbage, and you know all what else. Many in the lower class do not speak English and some of those who do have a slough of stories about how they “fell” from one or both of the two social castes above.

Some of these stories are truly tragic. The lower class increases daily as a sub-culture of poverty. This fold knows the days each local church gives out canned food and free clothes. They know how to get government assistance. They know how to get Medi-Cal. They know how to go through a trash can. The group seems to be growing. Feasibly, they could one day outnumber both groups above. Could this be the recipe for an uprising? Maybe. Something to ponder.

To sum it up, the middle wants to be the upper and the lower wants to be the middle. One can only wager a guess what the upper would want. If I ever find out, I’ll share it here! What is a post-modern social class really, and is it possible for just anybody to change classes? I’d say it simply depends on how dedicated you are to getting “un” stuck from the middle that holds so many of us Americans in its grip.

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