An Elitist New Year
I was at my in-laws’ house for New Year’s Eve.
I was somewhat damaged by the experience.
My in-laws are perfectly nice people, as long as you can keep them off topics of politics and religion. Unfortunately, they invited a whole lot of their friends and relatives over for the party.
So picture, if you will, a room full of well-off individuals: doctors and their spouses, people who own giant houses in posh neighborhoods and drive fancy expensive cars to their giant beach houses for weekend getaways. The guests at this party were not members of the top 1% of our economically stratified society; but they are easily in the top 15%.
Now picture these wealthy individuals, dressed in their finery, lambasting the students, working families, middle-class parents and homeless people who participated in the Occupy movement by calling the Occupiers “elitist” of all things!
Listen, I’ve got nothing against nice houses. Someday my wife and I hope to move up, after we get out from our current underwater mortgage.
But it strikes me as silly, no, hypocritical, for an individual with a personal net worth above a million dollars to describe homeless protesters as “elitist.”
I was at the event as a favor to my wife, so I was not about to get into an argument with her family and their friends. Instead, we sat in a corner for a while and tried to talk about innocuous topics like sports and the personal habits of former roommates. Eventually, the political conversation grew too loud to talk over, and I was forced to hide in another room.
Here are a few more of the gems I was subjected to before my retreat:
“Social justice is just another word for socialism.” Oh, really? The fact that anyone is willing to make a statement like this simply signifies their overwhelming opposition to the concept of equality: be it equality of opportunity; or equality under the law. Never mind that guaranteeing the political equality of all citizens regardless of race, creed, color, or financial status used to be considered a fundamental American virtue: clearly the very concept of equality itself has now been reduced to an object of derision in the eyes of the ruling class. The word “socialism” has lost all meaning in our modern linguistics: the word no longer has anything to do with any particular political philosophy. When spoken by conservatives, this word is nothing more than another way of calling someone an ass hole.
There was more. They talked at length about which of the Republican presidential contenders is the most strongly anti-choice, since this issue is their overriding concern.
As I finally got up to leave, one of the guests opined, “I am very concerned about the direction this country is heading right now.”
So to you, lady, whoever you are, and to all your like-minded extremists, none of whom are ever likely to read this: if you do ever happen to stumble across this blog, I want you to know that we have something in common. Just like you, I too am very concerned about the direction this country is heading.
For I look around me, and I see people like you who strongly believe that improving the lot of the poor is the greatest imaginable evil. I see a government held hostage by such extreme ideologues that they would rather push the entire country into bankruptcy than hold the wealthiest Americans responsible for their fair share of the tax burden. I see a public that seems to have accepted the concept that the warmongering Military Industrial Complex really is the best structural support for the economy. I see a mainstream media bought and paid for by the corporations, unwilling to ask any tough questions, gone soft on systematic invasions of privacy.
And behind all these troubling trends, I see extremists like you: people who advocate a Christian totalitarianism, a fundamentalist theocracy, a rule of the clergy, an American Caliphate, built on extremist interpretations of the Bible in place of Sharia, but effectively achieving the same end of subjugating the masses and the state to the will of the Church.
Yeah, Happy New Year.