Let’s Take a Second Look at This Whole “Socialism” Thing
Wanting to save the middle class?
We’re living in a time where the major political parties each spout that they are the better choice to “save the middle class.” They assume, accurately, I’m afraid, that most know what the middle class more or less is: consumers and producers earning enough to scrape by and to hopefully offer their kids a slightly “better life” than they’ve had and blahblahblah…
There was a time in America in my lifetime where we disdained the limitations of middle-class life, and mocked dreams of a two-car garage and a barbecue and 2.3 kids. We refused to see ourselves and our brief time being alive solely in terms of our usefulness for working 40 hours plus per week to make some other asshole rich.
Deviation from the standard cultural mores of our dominant society was not so lonely back then when many young adults scrambled to find meaning in life, beyond the narrow and specific economic terms by which most people lived. This wasn’t so much a question of takers vs. makers, as it was about individuals, unwilling to see their lives with such profound limitations of imagination and freedom: individuals with the desire to become something other than and hopefully greater than a producer/consumer.
The world has now been quietly, invisibly reconstructed to eliminate any option beyond the “worker” becoming middle class, as if this economic status is the highest goal to which a sane or reasonable person could or should aspire.
No one needs to tell you to limit your dreams to the consumption of shit and leave it at that because you just automatically, without question, accept it.
When you have kids, you buy them shit too; in fact, you operate as if all you need to do is to make sure they are always longing for just a bit more then someone else is getting and you’ll be doing them this great service of finding their way into the middle class, where, if you don’t look too closely, ALL dreams come true. Never mind that those dreams are small, cheap-ass responses to a lifelong manipulation by the small numbers of people who really CAN do/have/be/ whatever the fuck they want — and believe me these people are NOT middle class nor “workers”.
If and when you ever begin to question your most basic assumptions about reality and life — only then can you begin to dream on a scale worthy of your humanity, worthy of your existence in the world.
Damn few of us ever get there.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, a world without end…But what kind of world for you?