"What the series did was to give me a quality of self-confidence," the self-confidence to stretch even more as an actor and the feeling of "material security, of being recognized and appreciated".
In other words, marriage and the family are much more important to the material security of working-class people than they are to wealthier people, who are usually better able to afford attorneys to construct the intricate web of legal documents needed to imperfectly mimic the contractual features of heterosexual marriage.
The Nasserite state succeeded in delivering material security to much of its population, but it was based on a strictly paternal model of authority: the highest ranks of the military would rule in the interests of everybody, and everybody would be grateful for their munificence.
Ocasio-Cortez's platform, which is a long ways from being put into practice, will prove harder to attack, because the message is simple: The government should provide a basic level of material security for people.
The impulse of movies to think big and dark was probably spurred by the global financial crisis and the continuing recession, which have eroded a fundamental sense of material security and allowed a premonition of impending chaos to spread.
Although my parents owned their apartment as well as a summer house an hour out of the city in unchic Atlantic Beach, they did not appear to take these as benchmarks of adulthood or signifiers of material security.
Of course, we have to accept high levels of inequality, an elitist education system, propaganda from an almost wholly rightwing press, undermining union power, access to justice biased towards the rich, reduction of state services, etc, but we do get to keep some level of material security with only a modest decline in standards of living.
We still, for the moment, have peace not war; most lives have a measure of material security that was unthinkable a century ago; the rule of law is a reality, and civic equality is respected.
However, the elderly lady is also presented in a context of material security and emotional well-being, while the body stance of the nun, bending forward from behind the armchair to lend a hand in opening the parcel, can be characterised as caring, triggering positive judgement values.
This situation was easy enough to tolerate when the social order was delivering a baseline of material security.
But the neighborhood around them suggests a degree of material security that its equivalents in Camden, Detroit and Gary can, at this point, not even dream of.
