Americans are a deeply conformist society. We are raised to conform in school, where deviating from the norms gets you ostracized and bullied. Many of us don't even realize the damage that has been done to us.
Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to what individuals perceive is normal of their society or social group. This influence occurs in small groups and society as a whole, and may result from subtle unconscious influences, or direct and overt social pressure. Conformity can occur in the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or watching television, even when alone.
What results from the kind of socialized conformity we have all been exposed to are people who are powerless. We as a group are waiting for someone else to sound the alarm and lead us into battle against the injustice. But we as a group are afraid to follow. The current situation is what we know. And according to our childhood training, the current situation will certainly get worse if we deviate from the norm.
Perhaps this is why open hearted people would sit around and bicker amongst themselves. We yell about the situation. We know what should be done. We sound convincing as hell.
But nothing ever happens.
Lets face it. We all (ok not you Ms Smartypants) got suckered by the message of hope. We thought the working class finally had a leader. He sounded like one. It took a lot of heart from working folks to elect him. But then he went and hired Geithner and Summers. Then he said that we couldn't have a public option because there were some Americans who just wouldn't play by the rules and they couldn't expect coverage.
But you know who doesn't play by the rules, don't you? All the Wall Street hotshots who don't have to dirty their hands with illegal activity. They just invent stuff that isn't illegal yet! It's a genius strategy. it's working out great for them.
What are we gonna do about it?
We are going to whine. We are going to be scared. We are going to be outraged. We are going to call our representatives. We are going to go all biblical and shame our fellow Americans who fail to see what we are on about. We are going to buy a sternly worded bumpersticker.
Here's the deal fellow Americans who have a heart. It's too late for talking to our representatives. Nothing is going to change until we stand up and put fear into the hearts of the elite class. We have a lot of power but we haven't learned to convince anyone we are serious.
It's a scary thing to consider. It's a real move in a world that has grown used to kabuki. It won't happen until people finally understand that playing by the rules isn't going to buy their entry into financial security. Until people decide the rules are made to keep us down. Until people realize that hope is not that thing that politicians use to inspire us to vote for them.
Making them afraid won't take too much. They will finally feel the anger, the pain we have been trying to show them. They will feel it because we won't be all calm and rational about it. We will gather together and take over the state capital. Or we will stand on the streets in such large numbers that they will realize there are a lot of us. It's not complicated. Once enough of us realize the middle class is dead the anger will become irresistible.
But we aren't going to be able to do that work individually. We are going to have to collectively do enough work to be able to challenge the norms that we were all brainwashed into believing. We have 30 years of rightwing talking points that have been accepted as common knowledge. We have huge resistance to being honest about our financial situations.
This is the work we need to help our fellow working class Americans to do.