I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, nor have I ever placed much stock in the occasionally even measured ranting of those who encourage us “sheeple” to “wake up” to the way we’re being “played,” by the liberal media or whomever (side note about “sheeple:” Those who direct the term disparagingly at others generally fit the definition--"those who follow blindly”--pretty neatly themselves; most of them follow blindly and continually reiterate the positions/opinions of their own leaders, whether they be Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or whomever).
Still, watching the “non-OWS believers” demonize the Occupiers as “unwashed, unemployed, lazy privileged college students,” etc., I wonder. Reading what the “53 percenters”--those who pay taxes--which admittedly hasn’t been much, lately, that I’ve seen, I wonder who convinced the 53% that, not only are they NOT part of the 99%, by virtue of their opposition to same, they somehow belong more in the 1%.
Then I listen to the welfare-bashers, who seem to believe that the “welfare” of today’s world is the same as it was prior to Reagan and his “Welfare Queen” or even further reforms during the Clinton years. Somehow they have the idea that we the taxpayers are subsidizing a bunch of drug-addicted freeloaders who should just go get jobs.
Again, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but even from where I sit out here in the proverbial boondocks, it looks like we’re being played, as if our strings are being pulled by a puppeteer or puppeteers that we cannot even see.
I look at the way the poor are being demonized, for instance, and see a “divide and conquer” thing going on--if we the working people can be made to focus on the poor as the real enemy to our national prosperity, maybe we won’t notice the “real” enemy, the politicians and the corporations who own them.
In a way it reminds me of what Hitler did to the Jews--he created a scapegoat against which all good Germans could unite against. Obviously we don’t have death camps, and I certainly do not intend to trivialize in any way the Holocaust. In a very general way, however, our demonizing of the poor is the same kind of identification of an essentially powerless group as a national enemy.
Maybe we are not truly being “played,” though. Even scarier is the thought that it may simply be human nature: When we’re under siege, militarily or economically, we look for an enemy; because we sense our own essential powerlessness, we look for someone even more powerless than ourselves--it is easier to victimize someone weaker than ourselves, obviously. Most of us lack the courage (or insanity) to go chest-to-chest with a tank.
Next time we get righteously indignant when we’re behind someone in a grocery store checkout line who is using a “free” EBT card, maybe it would be better if we wondered who truly caused that person’s situation. Is the person really useless and lazy--or was it that her job got shipped to India? Maybe it’s just that her minimum-wage retail job doesn’t pay enough to allow her to pay rent, much less for food for her 2.3 kids.
It might even help if we considered for just a moment that tomorrow, WE could be the ones depending on an EBT card.
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