Warpy
Warpy's JournalDo you always eradicate the women from this?
Do antiabortionists never consider the fully human, living, breathing, and thinking person called a woman in their antiabortion equations? Or do they subscribe to the mediaeval view that women are nothing but animated flowerpots into which a man places his seed, their wishes and lives to be disregarded?
No antiabortion person has ever addressed the damage forced childbirth does to women. They can't. Everything breaks down when they have to admit there is an adult human being with her own civil rights involved.
We used to have a social contract even without unions
that said a day's work was worth a day's living wage, supported by a minimum wage which was geared to support a family of four on a "thrifty" lifestyle, which meant chuck instead of sirloin and vacations in a tent rather than in a big hotel.
The minimum wage was allowed to fall relative to inflation from the early 70s onward and now it won't support a single worker in safe housing with a diet nutritious enough to keep him healthy.
That is the main thing that has happened, a government policy of depressing labor's wages as far down as they will go. When they hit the floor, they started shipping jobs to the third world, aided by trade policies that disadvantaged the US labor market.
The New Deal + strong unions gave labor the best deal it had ever had. A strong middle class was created and it was stable, giving a great deal of stability to the country. If the rich paid attention to what was going on, they got richer. If they didn't and just spent money without keeping an eye on what was coming in, they got poorer.
The generation that benefited the most was the generation born during and after WWI and who were teenagers during the Depression and came of age just in time for WWII. There was a lot of pent up demand there and their bliss was to be able to go out and buy the things their families had been deprived of when they were growing up. To their children, they seemed crass and materialistic, ready to settle for toys rather than achieve the progress that would break down regimentation and social segregation across ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, occupational and class lines.
That's basically what the 60s were about, that and a nasty little war that we should never have gotten into.
We brats did a lot when it comes to kicking down the barriers, especially the ones that said women were only teachers, nurses, waitresses and maids and only until they married. After that, they were SOL when it came to jobs.
The rich declared war on us during Nixon's paranoid administration and it's been that way since then. The economy now is the direct result of 44 years of conservative, pro business, anti labor government policy.
Not a fucking clue in the world.
I'm your typical white bread suburban cracker. I've been poor and I've even lived on the street for a short time but the sense of entitlement to better was always there. It was weird. I've always been oddly aware of it, probably because my health has caused me to fall through the holes in our tattered system more than once.
That entitlement is reinforced all over the place simply because of the way I speak and present myself to the world, the way I was taught in infancy by suburban, educated parents.
Entitlement for a lot of people is the basic culture they were brought up in and they don't know it's there until it's threatened, often by people who are only pointing it out.
Conversely, people who are not entitled by birth to a certain place in the social order but who make a lot of money despite the odds against it often have a hard time if they try to move up a class or two. Since they don't present themselves the way entitled people do, they're not accepted no matter how ostentatious their lifestyle. The latter is why so many of them die broke.
Entitlement is a bizarre thing when you recognize your own, really difficult to escape even when you see it for what it is, hitting you with guilt if you don't live up to it.
It's a lot more comfortable if you don't recognize it and that's probably why people hate it when you point theirs out to them.
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New Mexico
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 111,255