- Why protest SOPA and not suffering?
sigh KB's Top 5 Reasons The Poor Don't Rise Up 5) There's a difference between "destitute" and "desperately poor." If you have to give up your minimum wage job in order to protest being desperately poor, you're likely to end up destitute. If you aren't desperately poor, you have even less incentive. 4) "What do we want?" "mumblemumble" "When do we want it?" "NOW!" George Packer pointed out in The Great Unwinding that Occupy Wall Street was the largest social movement to ever arise without coming up with a single concrete goal. 3) Work Ethic. Nick Reding pointed out in Methland that the United States has always associated hard labor with virtue, virtue with wealth and wealth with hard labor. This is why the two largest populations in history with methamphetamine problems are the American poor and the Nazis. If you're poor, it's because you're lazy; after all, there's always a third or fourth job you can get and if you don't want to pick watermelons there's a Dominican with a real work ethic eager to take your slot, Johnson, now put your back into it. 2) I Ain't Homeless, I'm Between Jobs. Something like 40% of the chronic homeless suffer from mental illness. 40% suffer from addiction. Therefore if you're homeless you've got even odds that you're crazy, a junkie or both. Not crazy or a junkie? You probably aren't actually homeless, you're just a guy hopping couches, using Starbucks for WiFi, showering at 24-hour Fitness and waiting for your luck to turn. Better not to talk about it or you'll jinx it. 1) Consumption is cool. From Flip This House to Storage Wars it's easy to see that everyone can make it rich from unwanted crap. Have another credit card. Have another HELOC. Of course you need to spend $120k on a Theater Arts degree - college is about finding your bliss! And there's a credit card with 0% balance transfers so you can just skate that sucker on by - whatever you do, don't pay it off. That's not "going debt free" that's "deleveraging" and it makes Janet Yellen cry. But the special bonus reason? We have the most advanced military in the world and they've been giving their table scraps to police for so long that we don't even think it's weird that a squad of dudes in black body armor with machine guns should invade a house in the middle of the night looking for a pot dealer. Rise up? They will fuck your shit up and it's one thing to have your shit fucked up over civil rights. It's another thing entirely to have your shit fucked up over marginal tax rates. While you were out protestin', son, I was out hustlin' and now not only do you have a broken wrist and a face full of pepper spray, you're also $20 behind me. Fuck freedom get money.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
-J̶o̶h̶n̶ ̶S̶t̶e̶i̶n̶b̶e̶c̶k̶ Edit: John actually did not say this, thanks backtoyoujim. I don't think it takes anything away from the message however.
No one hates the American poor more than the American poor. I've said it before, and I expect I will have to repeat it. I did my undergrad in Northeastern Ohio, not too far from Cleveland, In what is a pretty seriously economically depressed area aside from the University in the centre of town. The attitude that I saw there among low and middle class people towards poor people was astounding to me. "I'm in this welfare line because I lost my job in the recession, and my wife is too sick to work. I'm in a rough spot, but I'll get out. But that guy behind me? He needs to stop sucking on the government tit so hard - I see him here every week! Why doesn't he just work harder?"
I totally get you, and I shouldn't speak for everyone's experience. I can only say that this was the attitude that I saw and perceived where I was. I was never one of the people in the situation, but I rubbed shoulders with a lot of people who were barely making enough money to scrape by - a blown tire could mean the difference between being out on the streets or in an apartment. Some of this behaviour comes down to larger, broader questions - Why do we steal? Why do we have a create a narrative "other" for us to unite and help each other?
They need a leader. We saw that in the fall of OWS. A leader that isn't compromise-able. It's like that scene in Django when Leonardo DiCaprionasks the same question about his slaves. In the absence of leadership we get complacency.
I wonder if we're just guilty of the line of thinking that leads us to believe that our time is more important than other historic times. If we look at true, lasting rebellions, they took many years for things to get so bad that people were compelled to act. Slavery in the US (and pre-US Americas) lasted hundreds of years before the Civil War. The French Revolution was a millennium in the making. Here, we're talking about a few decades of stagnation where actually a lot of people are doing really well, and even if you're poor there's a good chance you have a smart phone. I think the poor should demand better policies, but I just don't think things are bad enough for long enough to provoke a popular uprising.
I think that's exactly right. Compare the grievances of those uprisings you mentioned vs. the grievances we are talking about here. Most poor people have housing, food, and amenities that past generations would have considered luxuries. Do they have genuine reasons of protest? Yes. But the reasons tend to be rooted in a system that perpetuates cyclical poverty. Education for the poor is abysmal and next to nobody cares. Income for the poor is stagnant and their wealthy leaders largely dismiss raising their wages. The game is rigged, no doubt but it's rigged in a way that still allows you to buy your beer, have a TV and eat your hot pockets.
I disagree about the last thing you said, but I think it's easy for us to be inspired by other examples of revolt (the one that happened in Tunisia for example) and forget that this all started from a straw that broke the camels back, while the problems being addressed have been around for a long, very long time.
Oh I don't know. Maybe they're not complete retards, and see that there's a limit to how much Other People's Money® they can use before the whole system collapses?“Why don’t voters demand more redistribution?” wonders David Samuels, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota.