Thursday Reads

The surprising thing about this report is the figure seems too low.
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Of course those supporters feel that way.  It is white male entitlement that is the problem, and Trump's supporters tend to be sexists and racists.

Here is more about white male entitlement published a few months ago.  The 1950s dies hard in this culture.

But white male anger is steeped in a lie. It is fighting for what they were never going to have. For the promises that were never going to be fulfilled. White men are the only people allowed to fully believe in the American dream and perhaps that is the cruelest thing to have ever been done to them and the world that has to suffer their anger as they refuse to let go of a fantasy that we were never allowed to imagine ourselves in.

White men who shoot up schools and workplaces are not murderous monsters, or mindless thugs. They are “lovesick” or “misunderstood” or “tragic.” Hundreds of thousands of words are dedicated to finding the reasons why someone with so much promise could have fallen so far.

But how much promise was there really?

How much promise is there in a life where you are told that all you have to do is exist in order to inherit a kingdom. How much promise is there in a life where your mediocrity is constantly applauded and every hero looks like you and every love interest is a supermodel, but at the end of the day you will be working in a cubicle with everyone else and your only consolation is that you will be making $1.50 an hour more than the women and people of color in your office?

The writer is probably too young to remember the 1950s and 1960s, when white men by the millions DID have the American Dream, thanks to unionization and especially the poisonous--to women--"family wage" idea where men's pay was inflated in order to pay for a stay-at-home wife.

Most of these guys back then could point and a well-paying job, without any advanced education beyond high school, could be had the minute these guys graduated.  For women, it was a near impossibility.  After all, they were expected to stay home and play mommy and all that other bullshit.

Thanks to neoliberal policies, policies pushed by politicians who got elected pandering to these racist and sexist white dudes, the American Dream went right down the shitter.  How bad it was that more and more men found themselves in the position of women and had to depend on another income in order to have a decent standard of living?


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