So we’re not sure how to handle the fact that
a quarter of
people who have jobs today make so little money that they also receive some
form of public assistance, or welfare – a proportion that’s much
higher in some of the fastest growing sectors of the workforce. Or that 60
percent of able-bodied adult food-stamp recipients are employed. (“Poverty nation,” Joan Walsh, Salon.com)
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DanielGree
There are two
aspects that have come together. One is punitive Calvinism which I have
been writing about for years. The other is the lefts denigration of work. There
was a time when work working for fast food places was smeared not because of
its pay but because it was beneath the poor. It infuriated working class
tax payers.
Now the long term unemployed and
underemployed and the Republican war on the working poor has shifted the
equation. The idea that the new populism will change the balance in favor
of welfare is very unlikely.
Re: There was a time when
work working for fast food places was smeared not because of its pay but
because it was beneath the poor. It infuriated working class tax payers.
Fast food is beneath
people. Speed repetition — what a waste of life! And people who find this
objectionable aren't being braked by punitive Calvinism — a belief system — but
because they're out of families who've only evolved so much over the
millenniums that they still only conditionally love their kids. Kids out of
these kinds of families, kids who have parents that still so much need love
themselves that they expect their kids to devote themselves to them, begin to
feel abandoned if in life they let themselves have too many good things. The
prosperous postwar years were leading many to feel this abandonment, and so
they willed in awful leaders who were going to push them back into dependency
so they could feel like good, loyal, unspoiled children and closer to their
parents again.
America's problem has been
for a long time that it is just flooded by many of Europeans least loved. Lars
Von Trier has said that, and he's right. Those nations that are more actively
supporting all their people aren't that way because they're more homogenous.
They're that way because they're out of more loving strains of humanity, with
each generation improving on the love given to the next. Go to a liberal part
of New York and watch parents with their children. Listening, engaging,
supporting -- and you're seeing children receive even more love than their
still fairly well-loved parents did. You're seeing evolution. Now go somewhere
else, and watch -- and you're seeing children existing as a sop for depression
or the like. You're seeing people who will come to see themselves as bad and
who will view enlightened progressives as probably doing Satan's work. It's not
an ideology thing, but a brain thing. Owing to crappy childhoods, their
brains developed less ideally and much differently.
I think that Americans are
going to work their way into believing they deserve a living wage. But this
will occur only because they're in sync, in fidelity, to regressive
parental/ancestor attitudes. It'll come, along with increased homophobia,
racism, and suspicion of outsiders. We're probably 30 years away from a time
when American society improves out of progressives leading the way and pulling
everyone along with them. Another 1960s, that is.
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