Uummm…dont these Joe and Jane Sixpacks need to take responsibility for being to stupid and lazy to inform themselves about the truth about the Hannity’s and El Rushbos and Bushes and etc?

Didnt they fanatically support the war, dont they fanatically support christian fundamentalism and dont they viciously attack those of us who tried to inform them that they were being used by the power elite who are wrecking this country, calling us traitors?

Hi Kitaj! Thanks for your comment. You raised an excellent point, but you left out a few things. They are not only fanatically supporters of the Iraq war, (and more than a few of them are Christians, some even, God Forbid, FUNDAMENTALIST), you left out that these are the same people who gave Richard Nixon the tipping point which expanded the Vietnam war, and, most importantly, took us off the gold standard. Kitay, your critique is 100% dead on! I have only one question for you. As a Progressive thinker, which is more important to you; some sick-ass schadenfreude the likes of which have kept the working class and muddle class divided over the last century, or the complete, unequivocal radicalization of the working and muddle class?
I await your thoughtful reply.

This comment ended up in the wrong spot!

The most critical and telling part: The smashed TV’s out on the curb. If everyone did the same and got rid of their tv, we’d have a much better chance of uniting together and educating people what we need to do to survive.

Hal Merrill
[email removed for spam prevention]

I like Kitaj and Frank’s comments – interesting. I wonder about how to heal that rift, although that sounds cliche. Will people be able to get rid of their resentments over who people voted for or what they believed or how ill-informed we judge them to be? Do you think those sorts of conversations will happen – are they happening now? How do we foster rapprochement between the working class the class that is two steps away from working class so that people come around to some sort of classless, a-partisan unity?

I’m all questions today.

This is a depression like no other in our history. It is just beginning too. The shadow government that rules us has a plan; reduce America to a third world country status ASAP. The next war on Iran will do it and then we have the Police State to enforce the oligarchy. Marxism is the only answer but the people will have none of that, they are not hurting enough, they are not sleeping on the ground yet. They will come around sooner or later. The only answer is kill capitalism!

Truly

I suppose the answer depends on whether you have any sort of relationship with the Franks of the world or not. If you consider him only a representation of everything you hate politically, or that he’s too ignorant to see the “larger issues” and “advocate for his own class position” then I guess you don’t have much to talk about.

On the other hand, we all have to eat and stay warm somehow, and Frank might have been walking down the road you’ll be turning on shortly, so he might have a few things to say, whether you agree with his politics or not.

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the labor unions are less than useless in commenting on what’s happening to the American worker because of oil and the falling dollar, and speak for very few of us, in any case. But anyone who thinks that America can handle the oil prices seen in Canada or Europe is dreaming. Those countries have socialized medicine, public transportation, and organized labor movements.

The class lines have already been drawn in this country and thirty years ago, the money, like cream, began moving steadily upward, and recently began to float off shore. What a shock to realize that the rest of us are the milk, starting to sour, here on the bottom.

We’ve been told the causes are evil Arabs, speculators, oil companies, burdensome taxes, liberals preventing drilling and increasing red tape, etc, anything but world oil demand increases and reduced energy output. But whatever it is, few readers here think it’s going to do anything but pause briefly in its uphill climb, and Frank doesn’t care about the reason, in any case. He just wants it to stop, or go down, and it isn’t going to.

This isn’t going to be your grandfather’s revolution, I’m afraid.

“If you go carrying ’round pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow…”

Well Frank, I think it is important to understand how we got into this mess in the first place,and that involves pointing out that, between bookstores, libraries, documentary films and most important, the Internet, there really isnt any excuse for Americans to be so misinformed.

It has nothing to do with taking pleasure in proclaiming “I-told-you-so” but it does point to the need for the people to take responsibility for allowing themselves to be manipulated by the power elite. I mean, how could ANYONE have ever taken Bush seriously from day one except the wealthy power elite he fronts for?

I have much sympathy for working class people who inform themselves – just read the comments on progressive websites and you will see that there are plenty of people who are very informed.

But as for the nascar-watching, Rush Limbaugh-listening fundamentalist christians, I have NO sympathy because fundamentalist christianity has such a strong fascist element in it and I am just sick and tired of their demand that they have the right to take over the country and tell us all how to live.

So here we have another example. How many christians actually know anything about how christianity is used as a social control/mind control system? Oh, but we cant talk about that because it will *offend* the poor dears. Well too bad – if they want to act like children then they should be treated like children. The problem is, as times get rougher, watch for the fundies to become more and more openly fascist.

As for the upper-middle class and beyond who were prospering quite nicely under Bush and saw no need to radically challenge the System, I have – also- nothing but contempt.

So these kinds of people who prospered under Bush and demonized – often quite viciously – those of us who warned about what what going to happen now want to whine that the Americam Dream was a mirage and they feel betrayed? Well, they need to face the fact that they betrayed themselves AND this country by living with their heads in the sand.

Somebody has to do the dirty work and say all of this so I just did. Regards, Kitaj

Um, I’m wondering why ‘working class’ and ‘conservative Christian’ or even ‘Republican’ are so terribly conflated, here. Yeah, there are Wal-Mart employees who vote Republican — and there are many, many who don’t! There are working class fundamentalists Christians, but there are middle class and even more-elite fundamentalists, as well.

We need in the US to begin speaking to the issue of class (from the perspective that there is A LOT to learn). To damn this hypothetical Frank for an ignorance that is NOT representative of working class people is unnecessarily divisive. There is a wonderful tradition in working class communities of insight and politically-aware thought. (There is a wonderful tradition within working-poor and poor communities, as well, just as there is within communities of Color.)

You can start by punching potential allies, but I don’t think it’ll get you as far as actually talking … with us! BTW, it was an upper-class family that talked the local peace and justice group out of opposing the local (2nd, superstore) Wal-Mart, even when my working-class family was all set to fight it. –diana

The US is becoming Third World. Our standard of living depends on too much energy–50 to 200 “energy ghost slaves” for each of us. That’s the power of a gallon of gasoline–pushing a 2-ton SUV 15 miles–and it equals probably ten men or more. At 70MPH that’s probably 100 men or more.

Imagine it.

We’ll have a lower standard of living, but it will be “better” in a sense. Closer to the land.

Did you know the Senate had a closed hearing or report baout the future, and one of their scenarios is about Americans rebelling/ rioting. They know what’s coming. They are prepared.

Are we?

Kitaj, you have a point. There are many avenues of learning open to the curious. But people do not allow themselves to be manipulated by the power elite. They just are. To blame them for being controlled and manipulated is to attribute human beings with a finely tuned political awareness that we simply do not naturally possess. Political, racial, ethnic, and religious intolerance have shadowed every progressive spurt in American history. Why is that? It’s kept us divided. The elites want us divided. Did it ever occur to you that even some pseudo-progressive “left-wing” gatekeeper websites out there may have an agenda to divide us even now? I share your frustration with errant stupidity. Remember what Frank Zappa said. “Hydrogen isn’t the building block of the universe. Stupidity is.” Suffering has a way of sharpening the mind and is, often tragically, and unpleasantly, incompatible with stupidity. The best learning is personal. Visceral. Ironically,our Nation’s Judaic-Christian heritage has sheltered a lot of radicals under its tent, and I am profoundly uncomfortable cleaving the working class into arbitrary categories of the “informed” and the “stupid and lazy.” When the working people begin to suffer en masse, they will do what they have done in the past. They will connect the dots. They will experience a visceral and viral awareness. And then, of course, an even greater effort will be made to divide them. There are important progressive thinkers who grew up in the Nascar culture, and some of them may be more radical than you. If you don’t know about Joe Bageant or Brad Blanton, I urge you to read them.

The movement of people that will become angry as the economy deteriorates has already been counter-planned by our government. The elements of homeland security, balkanization of political views, and privatization will only make a bigger rift between the have’s and have-nots.

The sad thing is, the current administration already planned for this occasion by adopting those atrocious new laws ( such as the Patriot Act ), the new homeland protection sector ( FEMA, Homeland Security, which by the way, a great deal of the operations are privatized ie: security for the highest bidder ), and the deconstructin of any future rebel elements ( do you think that PETA was going to be placed on the terror list because of politics?).

The latter is the most important, because some rebel elements are kept in tact so that they may cancel each other out. They keep militias around, but a great deal of them have racial/immigration issues. When a country goes through a whole mess of have-nots, and certain sides have guns who don’t like another common side, they end up duking it out, and the elites will sit there and watch ( with their paid homeland security to watch over them ).

A great piece of literature to showcase this is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Going back, the surveillance industry will become more important to watch the have-nots and to make sure they don’t start a huge insurrection against the government. The US Haliburton Camps, the Active Denial System, the militarization of local police, wiretapping: these are all skeletal systems of a bigger system that will only grow as more and more people begin to dislike what is going on.

The sad thnig is, almost every single administration over the last half-century has been aware of these issues, and have tried to deal with them by not making mistakes other former failed states have made in the past. The world will look a lot worse than what you wrote; I know this is corny, but a quick look at stories such as Judge Dredd, and Demolition Man ( both Stallone movies, but I am bigger fan of the Dredd comic ) I think serves as a great predictive template of what the future would hold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dredd#Dredd.27s_world

In terms of the immediate future, we are currently seeing the musical chairs of capitalism run at full speed, as the haves are fighting for their seats, and the have-nots are fighting just to get in the game. But the music can end at any time, and if you are lucky, you will be one of the elites with security making sure you are safe. If not, you are most likely to see your sector caged up for being surplus people who don’t actively contribute to capitalism.

I don’t want this to happen, but its blatantly clear what the plan is. I could be wrong, but a fight at WalMart over money will be the smallest of crazy occurences we will see over the next decade.

A good amount of my ideals comes from these media:

Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine.
Arnold Toynbee – A Study of History
Jarod Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel

Movies about the future.

Your story was on point. I felt that it was a little tame, considering nearly 9% of the population is already jobless, and unaware of the world, regardless of being a Joe Six-Pack or a NYU Nancy.

Blaming government is disempowering and more then a little bit disingenious. God knows that I pretty much despise everything government does and demands, but asking them to fix what is really our fault is really kind of stupid. We did, after all, stand in silent acquiesence to their evils and folly, and even worked for these rapacious corporations, never giving a serious thought in our heads to where it was all leading to.

Yep, the main stream media did lie to us, and does indeed deserve to be burned to the ground, but so does everything else in reality. This picnic party that has enamored America and American’s is already over, it was never real, never honest, never ethical and oh, so immoral from it’s foundation that it’s shocking to the heart to fully consider.

Cute story, but dishonest at the core, because the blame lays deeper then the author supposes. Government cannot fix what is wrong when we’ve actually caused this ourselves. The good life was NEVER ours without a cost, and now the bill comes due. We traded away our independence, self-reliance and ingenuity for the ‘quick fix’ which was sure to die sometime.

This was promoted and supported by corporate America and the media, and paid politicians of course, but hey, we’ve gone along with it all this time. We kept pushing off the bill collector time and time again, just hoping to squeak by and make it through before it became our turn.

Well, burn it to the ground, all of it, and start over, but this time, build a society that refuses to accept pacifism and apathy and injustice as the price for the ‘good life’. And never, ever let those lying murdering monsters in media, corporate boardrooms and government in charge again, we don’t need any of them and never did.

Unfortunately, “Frank” forgot to mention Blackwater or nanotech or gmo weapons or… Frank will find it ain’t that simple

Right wing lower class people will not suddenly have an epiphany and decide that the people who have detested them for so long are suddenly right. Having worked with the lower classes side by side off and on for 36 years in the oil fields, the army, and the aircraft industry, you would be surprised at how stubborn the working class can be. So stubborn that they will willingly cut off their political noses to spite their down and out faces. They don’t want to be told, “I told you so.” They don’t want anyone to tell them what to do. And they will sign up with any right wing demagogue who promises them some shred of “Merkin” hope, some sort of red, white, and blue pseudo solution. There is a reason that Bush got reelected and it ain’t cause he fucked them so hard. He is one of them. DO YOU GET IT? HE IS ONE OF THEM!!!!

That twang in Bush’s voice, that wildly misinformed sneer, that swagger and bluster is the blue collar worker on steroids. And those workers will sink into the most desperate poverty, put the cuffs right on themselves, and blame ZOG, or World Government, or liberals, or whatever fantasy boogey man is in their pointy little heads, even as Karl Rove is kicking them in the nuts and pushing them into the showers.

There will be riots and the well-resented managerial class, also rife with love for the Bushinator, will suffer the brunt.

There will be class war, and race war, and anti-other war.

And, when the smoke clears, the last few workers who have not joined the security forces will still blame the liberals.

Give up on them.

Thanks Survival Acres. We are far closer in our thinking than you realize. Please do not conflate the “Frank” of “Peak Toil” with my own beliefs. Frank is only at the point where his eyes are open. But his focus is only on his suffering. His discontent, his rageful “radicalization” if you will allow me to use such an imprecise term, has to start with “blaming government”. He is not yet capable of a larger perspective that holds him unconsciously complicit in the destruction of the planet.

The backwoods spiritual teacher Richard Rose was once asked “how do we progress in awareness in community?”

He said that we should imagine ourselves on a ladder of awareness which extends infinitely upward. each of us is being pulled upward by the person above us, as we are, in turn, pull up the person below us.

I enjoy your writing,SA. You are one of the few bloggers who struggles with holding this larger perspective. Yes, “Peak Toil” is a “cute” story, because it focuses on raw and immature reactions to our impending collapse. It is hard for some readers to muster any compassion for Frank. At the risk of sound dis-ingenuous,it’s his story, so he gets to tell it.

I wrote this piece in order to start a conversation. A conversation about how we can all move up this ladder. I am honored that you have joined it.

Having been raised working-class, and grown up in a working-class neighborhood, I can tell you, Cherenkov, that you are right about the pride.

We’ve been told our entire life that we aren’t rich because we’re too stupid or too lazy. The middle-class appears the most content to point fingers and condemn those souls who wants something to feel superior to. Our fathers in the 50’s and 60’s had factory jobs or blue-collar jobs that allowed their wives to stay home and raise the kids. Like my Dad, they often worked two jobs, to be able to send their kids to college, so they’d “have something better.”

We headed off to our community colleges and State colleges, only to find that our white-collar jobs gave us less money than our Dads’ had, and our wives had to work, to boot, even to buy a house in the same neighborhood our families lived in. We kept the shame our parents felt, the fears of “not being good enough” compared to those kids who thought that “working your way through college” was an 8-week summer job at the business your Dad owned.

There is a “hidden injury” to class, that Sennett and Cobb write so eloquently about. That injury is exploited and directed each and every day toward not only those who are seen as “inferior” because they’ve given up the struggle to be “decent,” but to those who we’re told “think they’re better than we are.”

My Dad voted for Reagan, and then the airline strike happened. He was left with the feeling, quite correctly, that he’d been fooled, but then again, he’d been a part of a labor union that had done great things for him, and an international brotherhood that he felt was as close to him as family.

No one wants to be told “I told you so!” or told what to do, but if you listen, you can learn how we got to think the way we do, and if you appear compassionate, I might start making connections you consider me so incapable of. We might not be very far from this. Both Bush AND Congress have record-breaking low public opinion ratings. I can hear the whispers already “All must go! None can stay!”

You can condemn the working-class for their stubbornness and pride, but recognize that your very attitude of superiority makes the need to maintain some dignity so important.

I think Cherenkov hit the nail firmly on the head.

So sorry Kathy, but in the name of the kind of straight talk we so desperately need at this stage of the game, if your father voted for Reagan he was stupid – how could anyone have believed such bull****?

Reagan was part of the elite plan – see David Brock’s “The Republican Noise Machine” – to shift the country to the right and destroy the democratic gains of the 60’s. Check out Huntington’s Trilateralist White Paper of 1973, “Crisis of Democracy” as further evidence of the elite plan. In the process, the right-wing fundie christians were – and still are – used as useful idiots, supporting the very people who have destroyed this country.

After all the vicious, hateful demonization Bush-supporters have engaged in over the past 7 years – screaming that people like me are traitors, threatening us with physical violence, when THEY are in fact the ones who have betrayed this country, I expect them to openly eat a large portion of humble pie as a prerequisite for their inclusion back into the fold of mature adults.

After 51 years on this planet of putting up with the consequences of the neurotic, childish, immature intransigence of ALL the people of EVERY class who have supported the status quo of elite rule that has destroyed this country and brought the entire planet to the brink of catastrophe, I have had enough! Sorry.

Survival Acres, I read your blog every day.

As for the thread:

Like Derrick Jensen – ‘cept much earlier – I was deeply moved by Ronald Laing’s book “The Politics of Experience.” It was obvious to me – looking at my parents and the world around me – that humanity was sick on a mass scale (also dealt with in Catch-22).

However, like Laing and others, I thought the solution was the transformation/evolution of consciousness, of humanity regaining true, direct spiritual connectedness with the world. I – and others – thought – at the time – the late 70’s – that as humanity became more conscious, aware and intelligent that the ecological problems would easily be solved and that solutions to them would fall into place as part of the overall trend toward a more spiritually evolved civilization.

Obviously, it hasnt worked out that way. But the point is, perhaps it could have IF humanity wasnt sssooo sick and sssooo cut-off from true spirituality. At the very least, we could be in much better shape today in terms of facing The Collapse if this movement toward higher consciousness hadnt been crushed or thwarted. So, stop here and think about who gains from thwarting human spiritual liberation?

Why did things go so wrong with homo sapiens? I dont know. We could be one of Nature’s experiments that failed. But the murderous tyranny of christianity, its viral infection of western civilization and the way all of that has brought us to the brink of global catastrophe because of the way western civilization has dominated the planet, is surely a large part of why we are in the mess we are in today.

As such, I think that all the theocratic religions of the Middle East are nothing but forms of neurosis that socially and historically often break-out into forms of outright psychosis, and that humanity needs to grow up and rid themselves of such viral infections and regain true spirituality.

Ahh, Joseph,

In his 80 hour work week, he missed the library time (no internet then) needed to read Huntington’s Trilateralist White Paper of 1973, “Crisis of Democracy.” However, if you gave it to him, he would have read it, and given you his honest opinion about it.

As someone said on this blog, so long ago, he AND I got the sort of public education we were intended to get: mediocre or worse, and he was mostly self-educated. He’d agree with you that he was taken in by Reagan, and the elaborate plan to wrestle traditional Democratic values away from the Democratic party. Now, of course, we have no “parties” at all. Only corporations and the politicians they sponsor…

Having been over-educated in psychology, I will not respond as my historic roots have taught me, when someone calls your dearly loved father stupid. But I will say that that sort of “straight talk” might be cool in a blog comment, but neither useful nor welcome in face-to-face dialogue with people you are trying to create community with.

Brad Blanton, another psychologist from the even lower “trailer trash class” (his words not mine), would either punch you out, swear profusely at you, or laugh and agree with you in a face-to-face exchange. (Maybe he’d reserve his fists for more pressing matters…) In either case, he’d consider it a useful exchange, and thank you for it afterward.

Based on these comments, it’s going to be a very “interesting” ride down, folks, that I can promise you…

Joseph,

Chop, Chop, Divide, Divide, oh what a relief it provides….

Nice story. Our rulers have quite a different scenario in mind I’m afraid. Remember Bush’s 90% approval ratings after 9-11? Another attack once again blamed on brown people and piped through the media (shit, there’s a television playing fox news while I’m standing in line at Bank of America), will be all it takes for the Franks of this country to renew their phony bumper sticker psychopathic rabid “patriotism”. What they need is someone to blame for the coming shitstorm, and it’s game on.

Looks like Iran, possibly Pakistan. It’s spent. They don’t have a choice. No way arabs will control what’s left of it.

Kathy,

Post 22 is the best you could come up with in reply? Sounds to me like you dont want to deal with the issues.

At any rate, it all hardly matters since The Collapse is inevitable.
But hey – YOU put this article up (and you CHOSE to use your father as an example in your defense of the viciously abusive, hate-filled people who screamed that people like me were traitors for pointing out 6 years ago that Bush and the war would be a disaster for this country).
So how do you think people are going to respond? Are we supposed to say to the Franks of the world, “Oh poor baby, you dont need to feel bad about being too lazy to inform yourself about what is going on and instead allowing yourself to be herded like a dumb sheep by the power elite who have wrecked this country.”

It was never a question of your father having the time to read this or that in the ealy 70’s – I just mentioned that to offer proof that there was a deliberate campaign on the part of the elite to rollback the democratic gains of the 60’s.

The point is that people like your father were to dum…umm…politically and psychologically unsophisticated to avoid being taken in by political propaganda, and I am saying that any working class person who could be taken in by an obvious fraud like Reagan – or Bush – is absolutely stup…um…is not very smart.

But maybe there is more. Is it possible that your father identified with the Reagan agenda on some level to crush the democratic gains of the 60’s and return the country to the good old christian-capitalist consensus-reality-adjustment-normality, a reality your father identified with? Could he have been driven by the ego-need to amintain his little ego-reality?

You see, Kathy, the 60’s were a Planetary Renaissance Wave, and the core of this wave involved the recovery – on a large scale – of the understanding of true spirituality: direct access to the full range of the human spectrum of consciousness to the highest levels of transpersonal ego-transcendence.

And the WW2 generation did absolutely everything it could to crush this Wave and keep it from taking root and flourishing. Had it been able to do so, humanity would be in a 1000 percent better shape today in regard to the changes that need to be made.

In other words, Kathy, humanity recovered in the 60’s the key to the source of all scientific, artistic, philosophical and spiritual Genius, the key to transcending the childish, neurotic level of conventional religion and healing ourselves of what Wilhelm Reich called “The Emotional Plague”.

And of course, the power elite absolutely did not want a mature, intelligent self-actualizing populace who would easily see through their socio-political control machine, and of course the Church did not want its Big Lie exposed. And they could rely on people like our parents to oppose the truth out of fear of taking responsibility for their lives, fear of facing the truth.

In other words, instead of learning from the younger generation, they just wanted to selfishly maintain THEIR obsolete reality, and here we are – facing global catastrophe. Warm regards, Kitaj

Kitaj/Joseph,

Having posted 5 out of the 24 comments on this post, and being responded to each time by myself or the author, I think we may simply disagree, instead of attempting to avoid your discussion.

Let me say that I’m a bit relieved to find out it was my father’s generation who’s at fault for all of this. I’d hate to think that I had any responsibility for any of it…

The piece, if we may return to that, was discussing a shift in consciousness on “Frank’s” part. He did buy in to the rhetoric, and you want him to do major penance for that before, what? you let him join your club? No one is relieving him of the responsibilities of the choices he made in this story. I think we can all benefit from owning whatever level of responsibility we have for getting us here and for “buying” whatever bill of goods (“Planetary Renaissance Wave” included) was promised to us, instead of other plans. If I remember correctly, the Flower Children grew up and took over positions of power, and didn’t change very much. They went from “Yippies” to “Yuppies,” becoming even more consumeristic then their parents were.

What’s a productive course to take, after everyone points fingers at everyone else?

It’s really not that hard to understand, Andrew Jackson and many others have explained it throughout history.

Individual wealth has been stolen worldwide and in compounding fashion for thousands of years.
Recently the thefts have picked up speed, especially since 1913.
Individual wealth solves problems, gov’t wealth does not.

What gives a private bank the exclusive right to create and set interest rates on the medium of exchange?
Control money = absolute power.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Debt creates war, and war creates debt.

Remove the central banks, abolish the ilegal taxes and all problems will find easy solutions or simply go away.

I empathise, but not hugely.

We (in the rest of the word that US citizens have done their best to know so little about) hae sat and watched in disbelief as the US voted in Bush and his cronies TWICE, invaded another country illegally, have continued this so-called ‘war on terror’ (whoever heard of such a thing? It’s an oil theft in the guise of war, guys!), and have pranced about in SUVs getting deeper and deeper in debt for the past 30 years.

If you didn’t sae for tougher times but now want it softer, should we feel sorry for you? You’re like that fabled grasshopper who sang all summer. Instead of taking the effort when times were good to establish social safety nets, good public health and transport systems etc., you maxed out your credit cards and built McMansions. Oh, and trashed the rest of the planet while you were at it.

We felt sorry for you after 9/11, really we did. But within weeks you alienated the rest of the world by dropping bombs on civilians and declaring kids with their legs blasted of ‘collateral damage’.

Sorry guys. You’re on your own now. Just don’t come invading us next. We’ll be really aggro if you do.

I don’t have time to read through all the comments on this post, so it’s possible that similar sentiments have already been expressed by others, but:

I am reading a book right now called Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, about poor, working, rural conservatives, and why they vote against their own best interests, and it has been REALLY eye-opening. Before I would have expressed similar sentiments to Kitaj’s–that these people are irresponsible idiots for not educating themselves and they deserve what they get. But it’s so much more complicated than that. Which I should have realized, because everything and everyone always is.

I have grown up in a liberal, white collar family, and have had very little exposure to this segment of the country, and you know what? That isn’t okay, because we will probably have to work together at some point in the future. It’s time for us to stop feeling bitter about who voted for who, and start distinguishing between victims and perpetrators. Even though it may not seem like it at the moment, we ARE actually on the same side. And this will become increasingly clear as this scene plays itself out.