It could be YOU, - Democratic Underground

Mythsaje

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Mon Jun-29-09 01:20 PM
Original message

It could be YOU,

An open letter to Freepers and their ilk.

The next time you walk by a homeless person on the street, desperate to pretend he isn't there, maybe it's time to stop and think "if but for the grace of God." Because, given the situation we're in economically, it could well be the grace of God that protects you from that fate. With hundreds of people competing for the same jobs, mostly on the lower end of the pay scale, people who never imagined they'd have to choose between food and rent/mortgage are going to be forced to to do just that. And the chances that it will be you are getting higher all the time.

So pay your cable bill and suck up all the putrid crap Fox News chooses to spew for as long as you can, blithely unaware that you'll soon be on the chopping block no matter how hard you work or how long you've been at your job. Because of the decisions made, decisions you have supported wholeheartedly, the corporations and money men on which you hang your hopes will abandon you to your fate without a backward glance. The people you slavishly devote yourself to praising and worshiping won't be bending over to lend you a hand up. They will pay you as much attention as you pay the homeless fellow you passed on the sidewalk this morning. If you're not producing something for them, or buying what they produce, you are less than nothing in their eyes.

Think about that when you are dragging the extension cord from your friend's house to plug into the travel trailer that is about to become your home. Oh, it's against local ordinances to live in a travel trailer in someone's driveway, but what choice do you have? At least you have options--not like those people curled up inside a cardboard box under a freeway overpass.

You'll continue to scarf down the pablum spoon-fed to you by the cable networks, sure that things are getting better, all the while completely unaware that nothing is being done to actually make things better. How does it help the economy to throw money into the arms of people who will then flee to distant shores, or continue to make the same mistakes that have put us in this situation in the first place? Or, better yet, hoard it against future need? Yet this is the only course of action our "conservative" politicians will support. Anything else they fight to the bitter end. Talk about accepting failure as the only option.

Stand up for this all-or-nothing capitalist model, the one that says the only thing that matters is the profit margin. Go ahead. Be happy that your "conservative" representatives fought against any meaningful health care reform, because when it all falls on you in the end it'll be too late to do anything about it. Take pride in the fact that you fought for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' bottom line when your child is hacking up a lung and you can't afford insurance anymore. At least you don't have "socialized medicine" to fall back on. A little bootstrap levitation will get that kid out of bed and off to school where s/he belongs. Or will it?

Continue to blame immigrants or "liberals" for this country's woes, because what's happened can't have anything to do with massive deregulation of industry by your conservative "saints" Ronny and George. The fact that our last President--your President--decided, however unwisely, to launch and fight two wars on credit after running through the first budget surplus in generations within a matter of weeks--has nothing to do with anything. The "free market" "greed is good" people who have been robbing all of us blind and bailing as the economy crashes aren't your friends. They aren't anything to you, except maybe the ones who exploited your gullibility, Con Men in silk suits with private jets and vacation homes around the world.

Keep listening to your well-paid pundits like Hannity, O'Reilly, and Limbaugh. It won't be they who are squatting in their family's yards when the jobs vanish. And if you think for a minute that they give a shit what happens to the likes of you, you're out of your mind.

Be quick to knock on the door of your mega-church, where your well-heeled evangelist minister will be looking for the back door himself as people start to realize where the last of their hard-earned money has gone. It won't be going back into the community but, actually, either will he. He'll be boarding a plane to parts unknown with whatever he's managed to steal from the church coffers on the way out the door. And if she's lucky, his wife will be going along. If not, well, there are plenty of hot babes in countries whose names you never thought you'd have to pronounce.

This has always been a class war, folks... you've just been the ones on the losing end of it. While your jobs were quietly being shipped overseas, or filled up with low wage replacements, as you were busy being hypnotized by FOX, the winners were laughing all the way to the bank. We were all their victims, but you...well, you were in a class by yourselves. You were the fang-bangers in this equation, happily laying your throats bare for their vampiric bite in the dim hope that somehow you might be somehow transformed into one of them.

Well, you're not. And you will never be.

Did the irony of well-paid pundits who vacation in Europe and own multiple homes calling other folks "elite" totally escape you? I imagine it did. Too bad. Maybe you'd have seen the signs of the class war yourself if you'd actually been able to grasp the irony.

See, when it all comes down, and it will, we will blame the money men. But we will also blame you--those who cheerfully made it all possible with your determined ignorance and blatant obliviousness. I just wonder if you'll have the insight to place the blame where it truly belongs, or if you'll continue to blame those who were not only innocent, but tried the whole time to wake you up to the dangers.

Social conservatism is a mite mean-spirited and thoughtless, when you get down to it. But it's understandable to some extent. Humans have always feared that which is different. But what they like to call "fiscal conservatism" is a scam through and through, a way to get people like you to continue to vote against your own interests on behalf of an ideology that has been thoroughly discredited time and again.

The one thing you cannot say is that you weren't warned.