Re: Middle Class
turbulo@aol.com wrote:
I know the social democratic mind has a hard time digesting this, but history has known sudden leaps–both in society–revolutions, they are called–and the necessary leaps in consciousness that accompany them.
Really? Do tell. I’ve never heard of these revolution thingys before.
Maybe it’s been so long sinch such an event has taken place that we tend to forget they ever happened. But progress will never happen unless large numbers of people disabuse themselves of backward ideas. And the notion that they are middle class is one of the most backward and paralysing ideas American workers are beset with. It is embedded in many other reactionary notions–that money and social status are an indications of personal worth, and that the social hierarchy is therefore legitimate, for instance. But it is also deeply implicated in notions of race. White poor people think they’re midddle class because they’re not part of the underclass, which happens to be guess what.There is nothing to be gained by capitulating to backwa! rd consciousness.
Sorry to repeat myself after just six months, but… When I was in Italy in 1976, I heard a story from a guy who said he’d been bicycling on Sardinia and rode past a mental hospital. On the hospital grounds, a female patient was tied to a tree, and three shrinks in white coats were slapping her, saying, “You’re not the Virgin Mary!” Ever since, I’ve been tempted to recommend a trip to Sardinia for certain neurotics I know. But now I learn that that’s the sound revolutionary treatment for deluded workers. Slap ‘em around and insist “You are working class!”
Doug