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Kyrsten Sinema and the Joke About Bootstraps
My journey down the rabbit hole of trying to understand how someone who also grew up homeless could possibly vote against raising the minimum wage
Kyrsten Sinema’s 2018 senate race campaign was a joke. No, really. I mean it literally. Two hundred years ago, the idiom about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was a joke about how ridiculous it would be for a man to pull himself out of a swamp or over a fence by grabbing hold of the bootstraps on his shoes. And yet, what was originally meant as a joke when Andrew Jackson was president, is today a socially acceptable way to scold poor people for being poor.
Like Kyrsten Sinema, I spent roughly half my childhood homeless. On Friday I watched the CSPAN footage of Democratic Arizona Senator Sinema walk across the senate floor to cast her vote against raising the federal minimum wage. She patted Mitch McConnell on the back to get his attention and ostensibly make sure he watched her cast her vote in his favor. Then she did a gleeful curtsy as she voted “no” in a move that that reminded me of the mandatory square dancing P.E. classes I…
