Oh, no! You’ve managed to successfully pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — but you’re pulling yourself up too high! You’re leaving everyone behind, and drifting over fenceposts and low-hanging rooftops! You’ve got to stop pulling yourself up before it’s too late!
It started out so well. You managed to extricate yourself from penury by carefully sliding your forefingers through the leather loops on the back of your Poverty Boots. It was so easy — just a wrench and a pull and you were up and away. How you laughed, seeing the incredulous faces of your creditors and check cashers and naysayers as you whizzed just above their cheap haircuts. You even kicked the sign on the top of the bank that denied you a small business loan last year as you floated over the billboard promoting their holiday checking account specials near downtown. Yes sir, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps seemed just fine then.
“You haven’t paid your rent,” your landlord shouted, purple-faced, as you shot overhead. “I’ll sleep in a tree,” you called back. “There’s nowhere these bootstraps can’t take me.” (You were pretty proud of that one.) You drifted past a tree and snatched a plum out of the branches, idly snapping a bite out of the purple flesh while still keeping one finger firmly tucked in your left bootstrap. “This,” you said to the plum, “is the life. I don’t know why more people don’t use their bootstraps to lift themselves up.”
If only you had known then what you know now: once you start lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps, it’s impossible to stop. There’s no going back down. Your upward mobility is irreversible! What will happen to you? Where will you land? Where will you live? Will you ever see your loved ones again? Oh, you would give anything to have stayed where you were, boots firmly on the ground, bill collectors harassing you at all hours. You try kicking them off, but they’re stuck fast to your feet.
You’re a bootstrapper now. There’s no looking back.
First you start skimming the tops of single-story houses and low-level office complexes. You can still make out the calls of the people on the streets below, see the admiration and the fear in their eyes. You’ve not yet left the world of ordinary humans.
Your boots are glowing slightly, just around the soles, but you’re not afraid. You start to see the gridwork of the city fan out on the earth underneath you, catch a glimpse of the curvature of the earth, narrowly avoid a plane just leveling out at 35,000 feet. You wave at the pilot, who stares at you in open-mouthed astonishment. You point at your boots, and he breaks into a grin before waving back.
It’s quiet up here, at first. Then you look around you and realize there are other figures rocketing up from the ground alongside you. Not many — maybe three or four. But you start to make out more of them the higher you go. The air is getting thinner now, but you aren’t having any trouble breathing. You start to laugh.
“You too?” you try to call out to one of the others, but you’re not sure if any sound comes out. Everyone’s smiling. “Where are we going?”
No one speaks, but you hear a voice answer anyhow: “Where all the bootstrappers go.” Somehow, you’re not surprised by it. The voice seems to come from all around you, like it vibrated itself into life out of the very air. You look up. You smile.
Tags: bootstraps, class, everyone knows the phrase originally referred to an impossible task so you don’t need to point out that particular irony, fun with idioms, things that suddenly happen
Is this the twisted companion to Oh The Places You Went?
I had a coffee date with a dude from Tinder (haha, I KNOW) last week and we were arguing about the proverbial “bootstraps” excuse. He LITERALLY said, “This is America, after all!” I should send this to him, but I buried him behind the coffee shop. #sorrynotsorry
make sure you salt the ground so nothing can grow
Also salt and burn the bones so his ghost can’t come back to haunt us by whispering about the white male libertarian utopia that is the inevitable result of the free market being allowed to function naturally.
I really think Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity would have been much happier if she had just realized she is the best bootstrapper, just floating about in space. The bootstrappiest.
Immediate petition to force anyone who utters the phrase “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” while talking about systemic poverty to spend one year working a minimum-wage job on food stamps with two children, no healthcare, and no external monetary supports.
Free markets! *jazz hands*
Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps always seemed like an acrobatic feat. Do you have to be hanging upside-down? Is this why most people haven’t figured it out yet?
Do people’s boots even have straps? I guess one pair of mine do, but they’re kind of decorative.
I always imagined that bootstraps were synonymous with shoelaces, but your question is making reconsider this formerly cherished assumption.
Bootstraps are the small flat loops of fabric on the back (or in the case of cowboy boots, the sides) of the boot which are used to pull boots on.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20061102210741…
According to Wikipedia “The saying ‘to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps’ was already in use during the 19th century as an example of an impossible task.” So you’re not wrong!
We’ve been lied to by the agents of capitalism even more than we thought!
I was genuinely surprised by that tag, but also would very much like to see it return.
Well, if you think about it, all you’d be doing is pulling your feet closer into your body. You just end up as a ball. It’s like trying to stand up after you fall over when cross-country skiing: impossible.
Only if you stop once you reach your head. If you keep lifting you’ll end up upside-down, but you know the old saying “Upside-down in mid-air is better than being right-way-up on the ground.” (Traditional)
Mostly it just makes me think of the Lorax, hoisting himself away.
To become successful yet remain grounded it’s best to pull on the belt loops. Because you can only be so full of yourself with an enormous wedgie, or your pants on the ground.
To become successful yet remain grounded it's best to pull on the belt loops. Because you can only be so full of yourself with an enormous wedgie, or your pants on the ground.
Relevant: I was made redundant yesterday and when I told Mr TARDIStime he immediately said “let’s get champagne!” and we went and got champagne.
I guess I’m going to need some strappy boots now?
If the world were just, all libertarians would be raptured into the vacuum of space immediately.
and they would all be on quite equal footing out there! both just and appropriate.
If the world were just, all libertarians would be raptured into the vacuum of space immediately.
I want to print this out and hand it to people when they tell me to pull myself up by my bootstraps. I don't usually get it money-wise, but depression-wise.
Also, Mallory, are you me? I, too, like taking nonsensical idioms and such way too far, to their (il)logical conclusion.
Climb every bootstrap
Ford ev’ry jetstream
Float o’er every rainbow
Till you find your dream
I don't usually get it money-wise, but depression-wise.
D:
They just. Don't. Get it.