I just discovered something I should have realized long ago – people will believe just about anything and once they do and they will blame all their problems on those beliefs no matter how erroneous, nonsensical, or illogical they are. I read the New York Times to get my daily dose of left wing, which is the political persuasion of over 90 percent of those commenting on their Op/Ed pages. A few percent of the comments are right wing and a couple are somewhere in between or libertarian. I like to read the comments anyway, especially on popular articles. You never can tell exactly what you’ll get; as the saying goes, even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut.
I recently read Charles M. Blow’s column titled, “The Morose Middle Class” and all 350-plus comments. The theme was nicely summed up in the first sentence, “The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm.” If you’re looking for reader response, a subject such as ‘the betrayal of the middle class’ is almost as sure–fire as gun control or abortion.
A few comments showed some thought, but even among that group, not all were on point. One contributor explained how he maintained a middle class lifestyle on a small retirement by moving to Mexico. However, the column was about the condition, future, and psychology of the middle class, not about the best place to retire. As it turned out almost all the comments were prepackaged attacks on the usual suspects in the appropriate ideological proportions. The liberals blamed the conservatives and the conservatives blamed the liberals. The libertarians said it was because people weren’t free.
No one was spared; no president or congress (past or present), the wealthy, poor, corporations, government, banks, education, China, NAFTA, Mexico, consumerism, out- and in-sourcing, over- and under-qualified workers, legal and illegal immigrants, black laziness and white racism, welfare (individual, corporate, and investment), high and low taxes, healthcare, regulation and deregulation, unions and the lack of, parked foreign profits and high corporate tax rates, and the Dow, etc.
You get the idea.
The writers were not really commenting on the problem or the story, they were just parroting their personal pet peeves based on their political and/or social bent. They had long ago made up their minds about which villain or villains were responsible for the economic and cultural changes in American society, and their comments – such as they were – were merely regurgitations of these strongly held, but incomplete and almost never justified, beliefs.
There was, however, one group almost universally left off the blame list for the plight of the middle class and that was – the middle class. Who else? It was as if everyone decided that the entire middle class had no control of any aspect of their lives – past, present, or future.
The anger and scapegoating are understandable in human terms, but the evidence is that the middle class bears a lot more responsibility for their plight than they are willing to admit. As the world changed, too many of them did not because they were too comfortable – too sure that things would never change. Complacency infected most, greed got the better of some, as did hubris, and together they are a deadly combination.
America’s middle class grew up and grew old taking the facetious advice of Mad Magazine’s iconic mascot, Alfred E. Neuman who said, “What, me Worry?” Now that’s about all they do.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.
