CDZ What Difference Does It Make - Two

[midcan5]

In a certain sense I agree with an earlier thread, what difference does it make. I hadn't selected that subject when I thought about posting this thread, but then thought why not. Actually I feel like Trump is totally unacceptable but I'll leave the reasons out for the moment.

Without getting into complicated reasons why I think the issues today are problems caused by Americans themselves on themselves. Read link below, the comments are so many I have not read them yet.

Tell us what you think.

I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump

PS I will comment in the other thread and return here when time permits.

"There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us." Pogo

 

[saveliberty]

The Democrats came down to Hillary and Bernie. Bernie was viewed as more the outsider and lost. Trumps fended off the establishment and now both the left and right establishment turned on him. Anyone really surprised? Of course Trump hasn't done much to help himself.

 

[OldLady]

Great, great article.
No thanks for hijacking my thread, though.

 

[320 Years of History]

For now, I'm just going to list out the passages that struck me as poignant in way or another. I'll have to refer to this post later when I have time to share my thoughts about the bits quoted below.

American society has made it perfectly clear: if you are poor, it’s your own damn fault.

You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because, through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.....

What would America look like today if King had succeeded in uniting poor people of all races? Would my bar customers in Arkansas more easily identify with Blacks, Hispanics, and other people of color than with billionaires like Don Tyson?

Crying isn’t an option, we swallow the sadness, and it sits and churns and gets spit back out as anger.

I was angry that I couldn’t afford to paint my walls in shades of possibility. I was angry at my life choices that never felt like real choices. I was angry that wealth and prosperity were all around me while my hands remained clenched in empty pockets.

What I couldn’t understand was why my customers directed their anger at other poor people.

“I applied for a job at Tyson Chicken. They only hire Mexicans because they work cheap. We need to get those people out if we want jobs.”

I heard this over and over from unemployed men at the bar. So why weren’t they angry with Tyson Foods, a company that could easily afford to pay higher wages? Why weren’t they angry with CEO-turned Chairman John Tyson, whose personal net worth is over a billion dollars?

The answer I always got was that John’s father, Donald “Don” J. Tyson, the college drop-out who built his own father’s chicken farm into a multi-billion-dollar company, was a good ol’ boy. He wasn’t highfalutin like the city slickers of California and New York. Tyson, they felt, was one of them, a working class man who’d bootstrapped his way into the top one percent. He wore a khaki uniform with his name embroidered over the pocket, spoke with an “aw shucks” southern twang and was often quoted as saying, “I’m just a chicken farmer.”

Don Tyson wasn’t just a chicken farmer, much like the plantation owners weren’t just cotton growers. He was a multi-billionaire running a global corporation. Didn’t they know that in 1997, Tyson Foods pled guilty and paid $6 million in fines and costs for making gifts to Mike Espy, then President Bill Clinton’s secretary of agriculture? Didn’t they know that, from 1988 to 1990, Bill Clinton gave Tyson Foods $7.8 million in tax breaks while turning a blind eye to 300 miles of rivers polluted from chicken waste? Maybe they didn’t know those things, but what they did know was that poor Mexicans were taking their jobs.

Over the years, Tyson Foods has settled numerous lawsuits, paying millions of dollars for infractions ranging from water pollution, race discrimination, and sex discrimination, as well as a $32 million wage settlement case.

It makes perfect sense that Don Tyson would say, “My theory about politics is that if they will just leave me alone, we’ll do just fine.” What didn’t make sense to me was that poor and working class locals would agree with him.

My speech pattern wasn’t formed by higher education or a silver spoon in my mouth; it was simply a matter of accent. But it is an accent associated with liberal snobs.

Don Tyson didn’t make poor people in town feel inferior, but outsiders did. I’m not surprised, considering how socially acceptable it has become to mock poor whites, especially those born and raised in the South. Instead of fighting for better education for the white underclass, we call them ignorant rednecks.

When they came up to the register to pay, one of the men made a comment about my hat. I didn’t catch what he said but his friends smirked. I said, “Excuse me?” My hat was a black and white newsboy cap. It covered my head on days I didn’t feel like doing my hair. But to the man, it meant something else, something I didn’t understand.

He said, “I guess you like ‘em black.” I said, “My hat?”

I was confused and I felt tension in the air. The bar had gone quiet. One of my regulars was sitting near the register, and he asked the man if he was from a particular town, one I hadn’t heard of. When the man nodded, my regular said, “Well, we don’t roll like that around here.”

I asked, “What the hell was that all about?”

“They’re Klan,” my customer said. I must have looked shocked. He said, “Don’t worry. We got your back.”

Those two experiences helped me see more clearly than ever how fool-headed it is to stereotype people based on how they look and where they live....I felt ashamed for judging that woman’s life based entirely on her appearance.

Did slave owners care about white indentured servants when they pitted them against African slaves, or did they want to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor? Did Ronald Reagan care about poor white people when he trotted out the fictional welfare queen, or did he need a budget item to cut? Do wealthy elites and politicians care about poor and middle class people when they send them off to war, or are they anticipating massive profits?

Trump is railing against establishment politics not because he cares about the white underclass, but because he needs us — for now. He isn’t reaching out a hand to lift us up. He wants to stand on our shoulders so we can lift him up.

Bernie Sanders was born into a working-class home. His father dropped out of high school and supported the family as a paint salesman after coming to the U.S. from Poland and struggling through the Great Depression. Later, after the war, they would find out most of his family died in the Holocaust. From this, Bernie Sanders learned a life lesson, “An election in 1932 ended up killing 50 million people around the world.”

By the time Bernie graduated from college, he was alone. His brother had moved to England for work....[Bernie Sanders] moved to Vermont.

It’s about opportunity.

When we have been pushed down for so long, it can become impossible to see whose hands are keeping us there. Is it really welfare queens or immigrant laborers or Muslims, as Trump claims?