Class solidarity

It's hard to hate your neighbour when you're sleeping in the same ditch

Passed a couple of ravine dwellers in town this morning, one a Black dude and the other white. Judging from their animated conversation and the fact they were taking turns pushing the same shopping cart loaded with camping gear, I assume they were friends.

Seems to me the animus between the races is peculiar to certain socio-economic groups. While I haven't asked them, I have a hunch Black billionaires like Oprah or MJ are more than comfortable hanging with billionaires of a lighter hue.

At the other end of the spectrum, you've got the folks who have nothing left to lose. Pretty hard to hate whitey for his white privilege when you're sleeping in the same ravine and taking turns pushing the same shopping cart!

No, I think the problem arises in those ambitious classes, the folks of all backgrounds who are committed to the chimera of “upward mobility.”

That’s a modern-era problem. There was a time not long ago when the son of a farmer was content to be a farmer. The son of a millwright was content to be a millwright. The daughter of a mother was content to be a mother.

But that won’t fly in the modern consumer economy. Those contented folks are the ones who bought a London Fog jacket at a thrift store thirty years ago, and are still wearing it. They’re the ones still driving the Toyota they got for graduation twenty years ago.

Consumer capitalism wouldn’t have a chance if that attitude got too much traction. Come on people, how is a multi-national clothing chain supposed to survive when people are mending their ten-year-old Levis?

That’s an outrage!

So, we’ve been conditioned to want more, and, wants being needs in the modern era, goddamit, if our needs aren’t being met, it’s obviously time for a revolution!

Unfortunately, that train of thought has become the dominant ideology of the day.

Egalitarian consumerism.

EVERYBODY deserves the latest $500 Nikes.

You can see how the shlep hoping to get another season out of the off-brand runners she bought six years ago doesn’t fit into the master plan.

And the master plan, in my opinion, is largely the product of an egregiously dysfunctional education system.

In my 25 years as a secondary school teacher, I witnessed hundreds of graduates crossing the stage at commencement to get their high school diploma who were functionally illiterate and had no more than grade four math skills by any reasonable assessment.

The parents of these scholars will of course want them to have “higher education,” because we’ve been brainwashed for at least fifty years to believe that’s the only way to enjoy a good life.

So, obviously, we’ve had to dumb down higher education to accommodate those high school grads.

The colleges and universities were all too happy to oblige. After all, course proliferation is the crack cocaine of enrolment growth, and enrolment numbers are what lets your institution of higher learning truly blossom!

At the university level, this phenomenon lead to the rise of what cynics might call bullshit programs.

Sociology exploded!

Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Native Studies, Post-colonial Studies, Queer Studies, and 1,001 variations on the grievance theme took off like nobody’s business!

Why?

In the first place, kids who can’t read, write, or do math beyond a grade four level still have a right to higher education. Therefore the institutions of higher learning are obliged to give them the opportunity. Besides, that obligation happily increases enrolment.

But here’s the real reason. Billionaires and their foundations love funding this shit.

When a white billionaire funds a chair in hoodoo voodoo at a prestigious school, he (yup, still pretty much all “he”) not only gets a great tax break, but he provides employment for folks who have graduated with their Doctor Phil in Grievance Studies!

Of course, there’s simply not enough billionaires to accommodate all those recent grads, and that’s where the rancour and the recriminations set in.

Oh, he got that job because he’s a man.

She got that job because she’s a Black lesbian.

They got that job because they’re a one-legged Aboriginal trans-man…

And so it goes.

The ambitious classes graduated high school and went to university. In their minds, they deserve a six number salary and a house in the country. When they don’t have it, it’s because of Blacks or whites or immigrants or systemic racism or able-ism or homophobia or Islamophobia or trans-phobia.

It’s never about the fact they bought into a bullshit bill of goods promoted by the billionaire class.

Which is exactly how the plutocrats want it.

The fat cats will continue to prosper so long as the mice are kept busy tearing one another to shreds.