I hang with my liberal buddies mostly. Love'em, but sometimes when they talk politics, I wonder what world they are living in.
It seems to me that they all would just prefer to go into a union with Canada or something. They really don't like the low-lifes and they also think that their concepts of right and good are the only ones out there.
But then there are my low-life buds. They aren't in quite the same condition. Some of them are doing OK but most of them are doing crappy. Now as an observation, nearly everything that they consider crappy would be jumped on with both feet by any self-respecting peasant in 90% of the world. But here, it is just crap.
Some well-fed, overpaid group of Doctors here in the USA even came up with a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”.
The problem is that there are too many of us here in the US for the number of jobs available. The tech companies are doing everything in their power to decrease the number of jobs through the miracle of automation. The migrants coming here for a better life doing shitty day labor down on the street corner or in the apple groves do us the favor of providing the agriculture/food processing/building trades a form of "worker-rights-free" labor for a industrial elite that doesn't even pretend to care about employees. The best thing about the migrants from the elite's point of view is that they can be easily disposed of should ICE show up.
Wage suppression coupled with squashed workers rights coupled with forced worker obsolescence appear to be the American capitalist dream.
So we are sitting here, looking at the continuing formation of an underclass. Awkward silence all around.
My homies here in lowlifeland are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are shitty minimum wage jobs, where the bosses would throw you over the side in a heartbeat (in defense of the bosses though, they aren't usually doing that well themselves).
These folks live in poor neighborhoods with crazy neighbors. Sure some of the folks in the poor neighborhoods are salt-of-the-earth, but a sizable minority of your neighbors in these neighborhoods are flamboyantly batshit crazy.
So the folks here in the lower stratum struggle to find something to believe in. But the struggle to just get through to the next paycheck seems to take everything they have, so their selection of belief systems tends toward the prepackaged and the loud, hence the popularity of the oddly dissonant clusterfuck that is American Christianity.
The world defined by the television or the shopping mall is not available to these folks. They knowing that they mean nothing to the elite that they want so desperately to be, and when they finally come to the conclusion that they mean nothing to the powers, they resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze.
Mostly it is knowing that you have no value to the upper tiers of the society that is crippling, because everyone has taught you that everything that you should want is there.
But then there are my low-life buds. They aren't in quite the same condition. Some of them are doing OK but most of them are doing crappy. Now as an observation, nearly everything that they consider crappy would be jumped on with both feet by any self-respecting peasant in 90% of the world. But here, it is just crap.
Some well-fed, overpaid group of Doctors here in the USA even came up with a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”.
The problem is that there are too many of us here in the US for the number of jobs available. The tech companies are doing everything in their power to decrease the number of jobs through the miracle of automation. The migrants coming here for a better life doing shitty day labor down on the street corner or in the apple groves do us the favor of providing the agriculture/food processing/building trades a form of "worker-rights-free" labor for a industrial elite that doesn't even pretend to care about employees. The best thing about the migrants from the elite's point of view is that they can be easily disposed of should ICE show up.
Wage suppression coupled with squashed workers rights coupled with forced worker obsolescence appear to be the American capitalist dream.
So we are sitting here, looking at the continuing formation of an underclass. Awkward silence all around.
My homies here in lowlifeland are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are shitty minimum wage jobs, where the bosses would throw you over the side in a heartbeat (in defense of the bosses though, they aren't usually doing that well themselves).
These folks live in poor neighborhoods with crazy neighbors. Sure some of the folks in the poor neighborhoods are salt-of-the-earth, but a sizable minority of your neighbors in these neighborhoods are flamboyantly batshit crazy.
So the folks here in the lower stratum struggle to find something to believe in. But the struggle to just get through to the next paycheck seems to take everything they have, so their selection of belief systems tends toward the prepackaged and the loud, hence the popularity of the oddly dissonant clusterfuck that is American Christianity.
The world defined by the television or the shopping mall is not available to these folks. They knowing that they mean nothing to the elite that they want so desperately to be, and when they finally come to the conclusion that they mean nothing to the powers, they resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze.
Mostly it is knowing that you have no value to the upper tiers of the society that is crippling, because everyone has taught you that everything that you should want is there.
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