Column: Learning from the toilet ratio

I have a theory that you can tell a lot about a person by their toilet ratio. Simply put, this is the ratio of toilets used to toilets cleaned in a person's lifetime. If I lacked any other information about a person, I think I could make a few fairly educated guesses given this simple ratio.

While my ratio in no way approaches that of your average Duke housekeeper (or most mothers for that matter), I have at least cleaned toilets before. I grew up in a household where everyone pitched in.

I also had a brief stint as a housekeeper the summer before I came to Duke, and I think those few months alone gave me a much better ratio--not to mention all that it taught me about work and class in this country. It wasn't until I came to Duke that I met so many people with ratios that are probably something like 10,000-to-0. This ratio speaks a lot to power, to who gets to sit on sparkling toilet seats and who gets to clean them.

I have never before known the kind of power I hold at Duke. I have always been outspoken, but for most of my life I understood that my family was poor and that meant we only had a certain amount of power. When my mother worked as a florist at a grocery store and a huge, tipsy counter fell on her leg, I knew it was the beginning of a struggle where no justice would ever be found. My heart broke when I saw the huge black and purple bruise that had become my mother's entire leg.

My once strong and defiant mother was crippled and unable to walk normally. We were thrown into the nightmare that is the workers compensation system, chewed up, tossed from lawyer to lawyer and spit out with a few hundred dollars for my mother's mangled limb. I wanted to be a lawyer then, to be rich then, to have connections then, to tell my mother I knew of a way out. But I only had my tears to share with her.

I don't think that just because my mother wasn't able to finish college she should live a life of struggle. I don't think that just because many of the manual workers at Duke had the bad luck to be born poor (and on top of that often black or Latino) means they should be doomed to a life of poverty.

No one wants to talk about the working poor. Democrats give lip service sometimes but they lack real solutions because they don't want to seem too radical and face accusations of "socialism" from the right. Republicans don't want to talk about the working poor at all, instead focusing simply on job creation while ignoring the fact that most folks have jobs but they are still poor no matter how hard they work.

Could it be that we don't want to admit our economic system is deeply flawed? How else do we explain the workers doing two shifts who still can't escape poverty? We want to be the wealthiest country in the world but we don't want to entertain the idea that it is only possible for our elites to be so wealthy because many of our citizens are stuck in mundane, thankless, poverty-wage jobs.

While worker productivity has increased 50 percent since 1968, the minimum wage has lost pace with inflation. It doesn't matter how hard people like my mother work--they will give and give and continue to be poor.

If some folks want to have nice cars, tropical vacations and mansions I guess that's all right--let them be the investment bankers and CEO's of the world.

However, at the point we admit that class status is mostly something one is born into, we have a moral duty to provide for everyone's basic needs.

We can't deprive folks of what they need to live, especially while they provide the labor that helps our country to run smoothly, cleanly, and on time. I can hear the conservatives now: "Socialism! Class warfare! Cuba! Oh my!" But I bet their toilet ratios are pretty telling.

Bridget Newman is a Trinity junior. Her column appears every other Wednesday.