What frustrates me the most about the country right now is the mental gymnastics The Far Right media has trained Citizens into performing whenever certain words or phrases are spoken or seen.
The original word has been hijacked -- to the point where people automatically start foaming at the mouth when that word is used. It's called Dog-Whistle propaganda. A word or phrase is used, creating a Dog-Whistle Word. Say the word and the human blanks out everything but the propaganda about that word.
I'm gonna hit the edge of this with the phrase 'Vanishing Middle Class' because The Far Right has really done a number on us.
I grew up in a middle class community, all my friends and family were dyed-in-the-wool Middle Class. Then the economic woes of the Nixon years, hit and all the jobs dried up and blew away in about 10 years time. By 1979, when I graduated, the economy of our small town had tanked and about 20k families left town in search of jobs.
We, the children of the Middle Class and our parents, didn't "vanish" we didn't fade away like ghosts. We struggled with increasing and ever more crushing poverty, unable to get jobs that paid Middle Class wages, unless we had family connections that could get us one of the few 'good' jobs in town.
Many of us fled -- some more than once -- heading south or west until we found someplace where we could settle. But thousands didn't have the means to flee, or their family ties were too strong, so they stayed and suffered the long agonizing slide into soul-crushing poverty and despair.
Women struggled the most, because one of the first things that happens when the local economy tanks is that couples stop getting married -- a girl gets pregnant and the father, (aka the Baby Daddy), bolts like horse in a thunderstorm. Any support from the government, no matter how badly needed puts them at risk of being labeled with a Dog-Whistle Word, so many women don't dare apply, unless they work for Wal-mar; there it's company police to Fleece The Beast and sign their workers up for government benefits in lue of wages.
Wal-mart replaced GM as the #1 employer in the USA decades ago. That company is owned by the richest family in America, a family that pays less taxes than any other in the 1% richest in America. Their company also pay wages well below the poverty line -- but no one calls the Waltons Welfare Queens -- that Dog-Whistle Word is for the single mothers who work for them.
This is where Generational Poverty moves in and takes over Fly Over America. Just as predicted in the 1970's, when the economy tanked the first time, the wages of the Service Economy couldn't sustain Middle Class, so an entire social class slid down the economic razor blade into the burning vat of poverty.
So here we are, 40 years later and once bustling small towns are now Fly Over Zones, or The Rust Belt, and the people scraping a living in these places are Red Necks, Hillbillies, and Pillbillies; frightening degenerates who are Dog-Whistled by The Far Right like attack trained pit bulls.
And the attack word is 'Liberal'.
The rage that helped put a completely inappropriate human in the White House stems from the fact that these Pillbillies were raised in Middle Class families, without Middle Class jobs. Their TV networks are filled with propaganda that enrages them. They KNOW they've been shafted, over and over again, by the same asshats who programmed them to respond to Dog-Whistles.
Everybody knows that Washington kisses the asses of the 400 richest families in the USA, like the Waltons, and pees on fallen middle class families, as well as the veterans leaving the military.
Education, health care and jobs (i.e. Hope) have been stripped from most Fly Over Zone communities and everybody is expendable as soon as they are injured or get sick. Big Pharma moves in with pain-pills and people who's souls are wounded by poverty and inflamed by propaganda eat opiods by the handful and wash it down with cheap booze.
Meanwhile, the GOP answer to Health Care is still: Die Faster Dammit!
So why is Congress so stunned that somebody went hunting Republicans on their home turf?
After all -- school shootings didn't effect Congress, their kids go to private schools. Church shootings don't effect them either because Congress is full of fake-Christians and outright Anti-Christians. (Somebody once said "You know the tree by it's fruit" so yes, they are Anti-Christians.)
Nothing is going to change -- the Anti-Christians in Congress will continue to kiss the asses of The 400 Families who donate while killing Social Security, Medicare, Health Care, VA Benefits, Education and Science because those all benefit the impoverished former Middle Class and Veterans.
The best that Fly Over America could do was send a mad pseudo-Billionaire to the White House and hope that 'shaking things up' would get them a break of some kind.
Too few people voted in 2016 and we all got the shaft as the result.
There is more reason to vote now than ever.
More need for voters and fresh faces running for local offices, because parts of the system are rigged and we need to tend our backyards while Congress and the White House thrash like a giant beheaded snake.
We need to get rid of Zombie Senators and Congressmen who have grown old and senile during their decades in office. We need to un-do the Gerrymandering that returns these zombies to office when they haven't had a pulse in decades.
The 1% families, like the Waltons, need to start paying 20% of their income in taxes, just like the rest of us. That money needs to go to Healthcare, Education and VA Benefits because working class America pays for their own Social Security and Medicare.
It might be late in the game, but it's not too late. We must tend our back yards in the next four years, to make sure we don't get fooled again.
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