Major league politicians and pundits, beltway journalists and business owners are asking, quite often, “Why are they angry?”
It’s a convoluted and complex answer.
I think a lot of it has to do with feeling lied to, feeling disenfranchised and left alone after we voted and voted for democrats only to watch them gain office, do a sharp right face on their heel and then slide into bed with the opposition.
They call it compromise, but as we watch, as our lives get worse and worse, they are the only faction compromising.
Look, I was born in 1964, apparently I miss being a boomer by a few months. So that makes me Generation Screwed Over by default.
My dad, when I was about four or five, he could get angry (Conservative guy) quit his job and be back into a new job by late afternoon of the same day. All of his generation lived their whole life that way. I didn’t have that. I was legally able to work in the spring of 1980. Unfortunately in northern Illinois, well, there quite simply was no work, and what was available, it went to people with families. I ended up in the military, what else was I supposed to do? My family was lower end white, college? That wasn’t even on the radar for my family, we never even discussed it. No, we’d be mechanics and cooks and that would be okay because it had worked for my dad’s generation, it would for ours too!
But it was during my generation that all the social aids put in place by my grandfather’s generation after the depression and WWII were deleted- by my father’s generation! They made good use of them to get where they are now but are too greedy and mean spirited to allow their children, us, to have the same benefits.
I went to work when the minimum wage was $3.10 cents. I earned $501.30 per month when I enlisted in the army in 1981. Now, at 51, I am being asked to vote for democrats who helped lose those social protections and helped guarantee poverty for too many of our people.
My mom paid $300.00 a month for a three bedroom farmhouse on an acre lot in Illinois, it was in town, the town had grown up around it. Utilities? I remember taking a check to the water department for four dollars, it was for a month of water and sewer service. I now live in a three bedroom apartment, it costs me $1600.00 a month. My utilities can easily hit another $200.00. This is not luxury living and the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. $2.13 cents if you are a server in a restaurant. People are not making it! Homelessness is becoming pandemic and why? Because business has free reign and politicians get free dinner- from business.
As a cold war era vet, I got nothing except a plane ticket home, no education, no thank you, and thirteen weeks of unemployment because Ronald Reagan had decided that anyone who did not opt to reenlist into the military, or who was out because their specialty just wasn’t accepting reenlistments, had quit their job. Thirteen weeks of unemployment- that was it.
Then, they and you sent all of the jobs I could have worked at to feed my family overseas so corporations could make a larger profit. After that, they demonized poor people as lazy takers who wouldn’t work, cut welfare, or reformed it, rather, in politspeak, and called us all a bunch of entitled bums who only wanted to lay around and collect money from the more fortunate who are working for more than minimum wage.
THEN, I watched our government turn into an international bully, a government that, in the tradition of soviet Russia and communist China had no compunctions about lying to it’s own people and the world so that it could do what it wanted. And back home, no different, that same government took away my rights, enacted laws that created secret tribunals and no warrant searches, it was against the law to even tell a person why they were being arrested and or tried. My brother is a police officer, he told me about two years after the patriot act came into effect “Since the patriot act, man, we can do pretty much whatever we want.”
And liberals, supposed liberals, you let it all happen,
I have a dream, I have a dream where my children and my grandchildren won’t have to live as I lived. Afraid one of my four kids would get sick, because despite working two jobs and my wife one, there was no way in hell we could pay for a doctor. I have a dream that citizens will not have to live being ground down to nothing more than a nugget of human frustration because business keeps growing, politicians join the rich and the rich keep getting richer while most of us can’t realistically survive a $500.00 dollar emergency.
I have a dream that a young kid from a poor family can still walk right up to a college, pass the entry exams and go to school without it being a deal breaker for his family and him down the road. Student loans, who the hell can afford those now?
I have a dream that the rights granted me, no, guaranteed to me as unalienable by the drafters of our constitution will come back to me. To all of us.
Then there’s the drug war and it feels really GOOD now to see employers stomping their feet in Oregon, Colorado and Alaska because they can’t get people, they are both paying too little and yeah, we are really tired of the urinalysis farce. You want good people, stop testing our bodily fluids and hair, we aren’t all going to come to work stoned and you bought into profit and ideology based hate.
And now the anger.
it’s because you disingenuous filth, and yeah, I do feel that strongly about it, you campaigned and told us you would FIGHT for us! You didn’t. You didn’t fight in the seventies, you didn’t fight when you had the power and you damn sure have not fought for anything that would benefit our people through the Bush and Obama administrations.
We watch it get worse and worse, we watch the pundits and the rich people laugh it up, laugh at US and you are in with them. We see our children suddenly faced with the same problems we had and damn it, you told us if we supported you they would not!
You lied, and we are damn tired of being lied to. You democrats and liberal independents have been acting as though all of America is right wing and you had to rush to get on that side- while saying you weren’t on that side and we are just so tired of it.
Gerrymandering, you could stop it if you wanted to, you could have that debate. Abortion too, welfare as well, people MUST eat or we consign them to their fate and while conservatives seem more than okay with that, we don’t want it. But you will not fight them on this or any of it!
End the drug war, by now it is common knowledge it was a scam, but you people are in bed with Big Prison and Big Pharma and you let US rot! Our children rot in jail.
Health care, the only answer is a single payer system, we all know it, you know it, but you don’t have the courage to stand up and fight for it.
I was legally able to work in 1980, it’s now 2016, the minimum wage has risen $4.10 cents- my children are scrambling to find anything that will pay a bit more even as help dries up.
And you, democratic party, are complicit.
Take back the dream and I’ll fight for you again.
Keep working to institute the right wing dream while lying to us, and all you’re going to get is incredulity that you believe we are that stupid and more of our anger.
It’s your choice, choose wisely.