Posts tagged as ' class distinction ' ...



 

Tearing Down Walls

 
 11 Apr 2009 @ 1:09 AM 

The first European pioneers came to America to escape the oppressive, elitist, tax-grubbing monarchies throughout the continent.  Those original settlers were not particularly looking for an escape from religious persecution per se, they just wanted to escape the master-slave paradigm.

They wound up at entry points that allowed them to at least congregate without class distinction.  Quickly, for many of them, they learned the bastardized English of the Americas and shed the shackles which had kept them in place for hundreds of years.

They became the new merchant class and the new bankers and financiers.  Some rose mercurially, while many many others struggled to make ends meet.  While there were no more kings or aristocracy to hold them down, Americans did – in their own peculiar way – develop a landed aristocracy and peasant class anew.

There was a distinct difference, however, in the  neuveau riche of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.   The stark difference with the European Continent was that anyone who was white could possibly join the affluent class.  The Carnegies, the Rockefellers and the Gettys arose, and so did the factory and the ghetto.

As time passed, many inner cities of America were awash with immigrants heading for smokestack industries every 16-hour work day.  Children often joined their father in the coal mines or the factory assembly line.  While life was tough, many of these second and third generation immigrants held onto that American Dream:  a house and higher education for their kids.

By the end of the Great Depression, many people joined corporations – which were sprouting like weeds – and gave up the factory apron for the starched shirt and false sense of importance called the White Collar era.  Yet the gap between the rich and the poor (especially non-whites) grew ever greater.

The new trump card was education.  We were indoctrinated with the belief that “to get a good job you should get a good education.”   Of course, the new aristocracy of America could afford the hallowed halls of higher education with ease, but a majority of white-collared automatons could not send their kids there.

A new aristocracy began which was not dissimilar to the one left behind on the European continent two hundred years past.  But soon enough, everyone was somehow going to college.  Once again, the Americans instinctively  tried to loosen the reigns from an elite class ruling over the strugglers and stragglers, but once again a minuscule cream of society rose to the top and controlled the debt-ridden rabble.

The government loosened the money supply and even the poor were buying TVs and cars on credit they hadn’t earned nor deserved.  The legacy of the master-slave dichotomy was silently being reintroduced.

By 1972 (and the end of the gold standard), the value of the U.S. currency became however much money could be created and backed by the world.   The problem was that money was as good as gold rather than equal to an ounce of gold.  In other words, our value as a nation became attached to perception rather than reality.

Riots erupted in the inner cities, young people protested wars conducted by the elite which used the rabble to die in the jungles and killing fields for oil and continued colonialism.  The rich traded the arms and built up the Military-Industrial Complex as a means to get even richer while people of all colors were dieing by the millions to pad the affluent class’ bank accounts.

By the 1980s, the inner cities in the industrial regions were rotting out, except in places like New York and San Francisco which gentrified their urban areas and pushed the less-well-to-do and homeless to far-distant suburbs which made the latter’s commute prohibitively expensive.  In came the suburban Sears and Walmarts to offer those displaced by gentrification a low-paying, dead end substitution for the good life.

Gated communities sprung up around slums and the European experience of centuries’ yore was once again staring us in the face.  Those inside the gate became and have become afraid of the mob – and justifiably so.  They became every bit as snobbish and elitist as the princes and princesses of Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia.

If you think about it, we still live in  an overwhelmingly elitist, caucasian-dominated world.  President Obama’s election is certainly evidence that a few people of color can break through the glass ceiling, but if you look at almost any online community of millionaires – our new-age equivalent of the industrial age – the preponderance of the multi-millionaire class are dominated by whites recruiting whites, mostly men.

The American Indian can fully identify with this White Man’s Land.  And now we are at an age where we must once again tear down the walls which separate us.

(to be continued)

Posted By: admin
Last Edit: 11 Apr 2009 @ 07:08 AM

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About Judge Richard A. Posner



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