ETA from the LJcut tag: (And what I'm going to say will be 'wrong' or 'not important' to some people, but here's what I know)

How to be working class--

a) Work
b) accept that disabling injury is an everyday part of your job
c) understand that you are all you have. There's no backup. There's no net.
d) Know that if you can't fix it you have to stand it (Read Brokeback Mountain if you don't get this.  Because Brokeback Mountain is all about being working class.  It is.)
e) tell people who say you are risk-averse and rule bound to spend a day combining grain, mining coal or running one of the guillotines in the factory (and yet, risk-averse and rule bound are not 'wrong' exactly--but they're definitely not 'all')
f) tell people who say you can't 'have adventures' until you run away from the working class life to STFU and stop talking about you
g) Work is life. Not that you work all the time, but that your work can go away and when it does you don't have anything. The mines close--you're not a miner anymore. But if the university gets rid of your position--you find another university. The steel mills close--you're not a steelworker. And you have failed in some deep terrible way. But if your company closes--you find another company. You lose the family farm--you are a big, fat loser who loses.

Lots of smart, creative people get out and never look back. Me, I never did. I still have and don't have working class values and a working class mindset and I'm not working class. I don't belong there anymore. And I don't really belong where I am.

And I have to remember that my experience was atypical in some ways (rural, agricultural, educated, and filled with books), but guess what--I've also met lots of people whose class background was a lot like mine--though many of them are my age and not younger and quite a few of them are not white.

So, how do you write working class people? The same way you write everyone else--as people.

And if you don't know any mechanics or small-time hog farmers or convenience store workers or nurse's aides, then, don't cry about it--get a life. Because you shouldn't actually consider being a writer if you don't know something about people who aren't you.

Robert Kaplan (who I disagree with profoundly on a lot of things) wrote this about today's Army in An Empire Wilderness:

Officers at Leavenworth read 'The Economist' and 'Foreign Affairs' and watch 'The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,' but that doesn't mean they interpret the information the way civilian policy makers and people in the media do. However sophisticated the reading lists, the people doing the reading here often come from rural, blue-collar America. As soldiers, they live in materially poor conditions, especially compared to people who spend their lives in affluent Washington suburbs. The fact that so many military bases are, like Leavenworth, in the Midwest or the South further isolates American soldiers from the sensibilities of coastal metropolitan elites. "It matters less what you read than where you live and where you come from, because that determines how you interpret knowledge," explained Major Susan P. Kellett-Forsyth, one of the first female graduates of West Point.

Kaplan, I think, wants you to think that all 'rural, blue-collar' Americans are politically conservative, but I haven't found that to be the case. Many of them have a far better understanding of what government is, what we get from government and what community means than people who have grown up financially, intellectually advantaged. Because for one thing they understand as many people I know who grew up in suburbs do not, what it means to have no fall-back. Money can mitigate circumstance. And it's easier to be conservative, to believe that everyone makes it on their own dime when you have always had dimes to call upon when you need them.