We have learned many variations of the meme that the U.S is a meritocracy and one’s future as well as one’s present situation is a direct result of the choices each individual makes. It has become something of a prayer that the working and middle classes, most especially the white working and middle classes, murmur over and over as they try to keep their heads above water. It’s becoming harder and harder to accept, but these kinds of purposely cultivated barriers are hard to break through. It is a part of our national psyche that the poor are somehow responsible for their plight. It has always been important to believe that. I think it is a defense mechanism that human beings have to keep themselves feeling safe, to ward off the bogeyman so to speak. If you are poor, unemployed, sick, without insurance, disabled or whatever difficult situation you find yourself in then you must, at least in part, be responsible for your own predicament. To believe otherwise is to believe it could happen to you. But as we begin to see it happen to so many this kind of thinking is becoming harder and harder to justify.
Here are some excerpts from this article
http://www.alternet.org/economy/1525..._people?page=1
six ways the rich are waging class warfare
1.Registering the Poor to Vote is 'UnAmerican'
2.Unemployment Benefits Have Created a 'Nation of Slackers'
3.You Can't Really Be Poor if You Have a Color TV!
4.Food-Stamps: 'A Fossil That Repeats All the Errors of the War on Poverty'
5.The Main Causes of Child Poverty Are Low Levels of Parental Work and the Absence of Fathers.'
6.Taxing Working People Less Than the Rich Is 'Perverse'
“class war”: habitually vilifying the unfortunate; claiming that their plight is a manifestation of some personal flaw or cultural deficiency. Conservatives wage this form of class warfare virtually every day, consigning millions of people who are down on their luck to some subhuman underclass.
"The belief that there exists a large pool of “undeserving poor” who suck the lifeblood out of the rest of society lies at the heart of the Right's demonstrably false “culture of poverty” narrative. It's a narrative that runs through Ayn Rand's works. It comes to us in bizarre spin that holds up the rich as “wealth producers” and “job creators.”
And it affects our public policies. In his classic book, Why Americans Hate Welfare, Martin Gilens found a striking disconnect: significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that
they wanted public spending to fight poverty to be increased at the same time that similar majorities said
they were opposed to welfare.
the United States is anything but a true meritocracy. What millions of white working-class Americans understand – intuitively, even if they can't articulate it – is that class still matters. And by erasing the very idea of class, of structural barriers to getting ahead in this economy, they are left with a nagging sense of grievance against those they perceive to be bringing them down: foreign powers, immigrants, people of color and liberals, with their “job-killing” regulations and the like."
End of excerpts from the article.
Apparently grievance against anything and anyone but the rich
But that is beginning to stop. The blinders are off. People are beginning to see through all the bull shit, deceit and slight of hand designed to keep us from understanding who is really standing on our backs and keeping us down.