Where the Hell Is the Outrage?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/09-0
"It’s an almost classic state of alienation," writes Eskow, "in which people may be acutely aware of their own increasing difficulties (although sometimes they can be numb to that as well) but experience them in a state of isolation."
From the first breaths of life to the last, our lives are being stolen out from under us. From infant care and early education to Social Security and Medicare, the dominant economic ideology is demanding more lifelong sacrifices from the vulnerable to appease the gods of wealth.
Middle-class wages are stagnant. Uemployment is stalled at record levels. College education is leading to debt servitude and job insecurity. Millions of unemployed Americans have essentially been abandoned by their government. Poverty is soaring. Bankers break the law with impunity, are bailed out, and go on breaking the law, richer than they were before.
And yet, bizarrely, the only Americans who seem to be seething with anger are the beneficiaries of this economic injustice – the wealthiest and most privileged among us. But those who are suffering seem strangely passive.
As long as they stay that way, there will be no movement to repair these injustices. And the more these injustices are allowed to persist, the harder it will be to end them.
Where the hell is the outrage? And how can we start some?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Love your sig line, btw! 
[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]Birds are territorial creatures.
The lyrics to the songbird's melodious trill go something like this:
"Stay out of my territory or I'll PECK YOUR GODDAMNED EYES OUT!"[/center][/font]
[hr]
But only because it makes you mad. 
ACA is absolutely a Heritage Foundation/Gingrich bastard child, that's why I call it GingrichCare. We didn't get single-payer, which is absolutely necessary as our govt. refuses to rein in the serial-killer insurance agencies, nor did we even get a public option. 
Well, it must be him then, because Obama has COMPLETE CONTROL over such things.
Good thing we have a Congress that makes laws so they can do something about it! Right????
I work in the tech industry that has been decimated by Free trade agreements. I barely make it paycheck to paycheck for something I put myself through school for. A lot of my colleagues and I see them struggling as bad. For one job opening there are a thousand people to pick from.
I voted for Obama to fix this situation not because I thought he was some fucking superhero. And don't give me the shit about obstructionism, 30 years ago it was called stone walling so it nothing fucking new.
Since O has been president he has signed at least 2 if not 3 FTA's exacerbating the problem. I'm thinking he's done the opposite on the job's front and made it worse.
Now if you believe all the pretty spoon fed headlines about jobs and unemployment then your naive.
The facts are out there where people work or don't work. Not in spoon fed headlines.
-p
Of course I'm looking, unfortunately 3d artist jobs were the first one's to get outsourced and it's steam rolled from there. You have to practically be a physics science major just to get an art job and I can't retrain for programming because artist jobs are in demand. I interviewed at a 3d house where they model stadiums and event places. $15 an hour. I used to make $60,000 a year. Alot has changed since then. You pretty much have to know how to code and animate and texture etc...basically if you can make a game on your own then you can be hired on as an artist.
If your a coder then yea you've got your pick, anything else, good luck.
As a matter of fact a lot of my friends just got freshly laid off from Glu adding to the glut of artists looking for a job.
Then when you are hired you work 60 hours a week for a 40 hour a week salary. I don't know about you but I've got a family and I like to see them every once in a while.
white collar slavery? I think yes.
have you read this. I see it as commonplace anymore.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023087439
-p
Sounds like Anatomy of a Revolution should be on my reading list. 
This isn't the case in the United States where, instead of "rising expectations", there is a growing sense of decay and despair. How to turn this around? I haven't a clue.
K&R
can see that climate change is going to change everything. We are not prepared for this, not as a nation, not as a species. "They" are building as big a cushion as they possibly can, cuz they know it's all about to crash & crash hard. The bottom comment is spot on: ...hold the masses in check for as long as possible so that the elites can continue to accumulate power and money. This, they believe, will save them.
I never was a glass half full kind of person. 
needed, just rate reduction.
The author is a transit and cycling advocate who lives in Los Angeles without a car. On purpose.
http://www.newcolonist.com/rr11.html
(snip)Now, community is one of the great pleasures of life, and we do it better than any other creatures on this planet. No other animal, for example, can use symbolic language to communicate with its fellows; no other arrays itself in an ever-changing second skin of emblems as do we when we don our clothes; no other has developed so rich a variety of social poetry as we have. We are the kind of critter that likes to chill wi' da homies; we are the back-fence gossip, the park bench raconteur, the streetcorner poet; we are the village idiot and the absent-minded professor feeding pigeons together in the public square; we're the handshake at a busy corner or the hand that helps an old lady onto the bus. But, ever more so lately, we are…alone.
What is your life these days? Do you wake up in the dark bedroom of your suburban house, dress hurriedly, stumble into the attached garage, strap yourself in the car even before you open the garage door with your remote, and roll out onto the streets alone in your glass-and-steel coffin, headed numbly to your underground parking structure and your cubicle? Maybe you'll drop your kids off at school on the way (your kids who do not know who lives around the corner); maybe you'll pick up breakfast at Jack-in-the-Box on the way to work (giving your order to an electronic grill, inching your car ahead till a plastic-coated hand reaches toward your window with the "food" ; maybe you'll watch TV tonight, because it's all you've ever done every night since you started working. Maybe that's your life these days. If you're in America, it probably is. You live alone with your family, and all the burdens of your humanity fall on the three or four of you alone.
No wonder there are so many divorces nowadays.
For seventy years or more the vast right-wing conspiracy has been telling us that we can be happy only in a little separate house surrounded by a moat of grass in a quiet suburb where everyone minds their own business. For seventy years or more they have been telling us that true freedom means driving everywhere alone in a car, that true security means sweating ever longer hours in a little gray cubicle at work, that true fulfillment comes from buying ever bigger television sets and watching ever simpler shows and ever-more-complicated commercials. For seventy years or more they've been telling us that the touch of a stranger brings a shame worse than death, and that the pinnacle of creation is four nervous people fighting over which meaningless TV show to watch on Friday night.
No wonder our country has the highest appetite for recreational drugs of any on this earth. ..
I hear you, ChicaB1.
You're right, of course. And I'm only half-kidding about the chemtrails.
.
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I live in a fairly affluent area, & this cartoon nails it. The Walmart parking lot is always busy & it has lots & lots of very nice cars in it. Some old cars, too, but lots of nice cars.
beaten into submission very gradual and methodical but ruthless. People don't know what action to take. How come we never discuss actions and solutions on how to deal ?
else knew about them every time I bring it up in conversation I get a blank stare. You've given me some slight hope
That's real heroic work. 
K&R
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Occupy_Protests_Map.svg
National monitoring and crackdown
Government documents released in December 2012 pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal FBI monitoring of what became known as the Occupy movement since at least August 2011, a month before the protests began.[346][347] The FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, local police, regional law enforcement "counterterrorism" fusion centers, and private security forces of major banks formed the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC) to collect and share information about, and to share plans to target and to arrest Occupy protesters. Banks met with the FBI to pool information about participants of the Occupy movement collected by corporate security, and the FBI offered to bank officials its plans to crush Occupy events that were scheduled for a month later.[346][348] FBI officials met with New York Stock Exchange representatives on 19 August 2011, notifying them of planned peaceful protests.[349] FBI officials later met with representatives of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and Zions Bank about planned protests.[349] The FBI used informants to infiltrate and monitor protests; information from informants and military intelligence units was passed to DSAC, which then gave updates to financial companies.[350] Surveillance of protestors was also carried out by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.[351][352] DSAC also coordinated with security firms hired by banks to target OWS leaders.[353] On May 20, 2013, the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press released a special report, "Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's 'Counter Terrorism' Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement
Everyone is invited to share in the outrage next time we hit the streets.
Hope to see you there, we need you.
13 years of outrage overload.... guessin' some RW think tank orchestrated it years ago.......
Fortunately some of us are still engaged. 
The answer lies in "all of the above" - because it varies widely for people, from extreme for those who are the most impacted by so many bad policies and decisions and circumstances, to mild if one is fortunate enough to live in comfort while viewing the mess from a distance. My first personally experienced outrage was observing the election of Reagan and the damage he did for two terms - and watching so much of the public turn him into a god. The outrage meter has varied from moderate to full on 11 since then.
I do believe major root causes are apathy from exhaustion/outrage overload, and the numbing effect of TV and other forms of entertainment (which includes no small amount of propaganda). Also, when blatant crimes go unpunished (essentially the whole Bush presidency, including his "election" , it opens the door for moral decay - we now expect that the more visible and heinous the crime, all it takes is power and money.
My wife and I find ourselves in an add spot - though the corporate world spit me out and kicked me to the gutter in 2008, I had enough in years and savings that we can make a go of it being mostly disconnected. So even though our outrage is real, it is muted because it doesn't hit us nearly as directly as our two girls - we have outrage for them and the world that they will need to navigate.
Great question, no simple answer....