Staggering Along the Periphery: Classism in America

[Donnachaidh]

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/08/staggering-along-the-periphery-classism-in-america/

“The rich are different than you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously penned in his short story “The Rich Boy.” Fitzgerald observed that, since the rich are born into wealth, it shapes their worldview — gives rise to an air of superiority and confidence — so that even if they do fall upon hard times or “sink below us,” they still manage to think that they are better than the rest of us. Whether Fitzgerald intended it or not, what he essentially described was a type of mindset that is somewhat akin, in its logic, to racism — that being the notion of classism.

In America, today, we are surrounded by classism. We are immersed in a culture that treats it with the same acceptability that its iniquitous cousin enjoyed not so long ago. What’s more, because of how history played out over much of the 20th century, with the struggle between totalitarian pseudo-communism in the Soviet Union and capitalism here in the U.S., the idea of class struggle has long been considered somewhat of a taboo subject.

The failure to acknowledge the phenomenon has not made it any less real. On cable news programs, entitled wealthy members of Congress rail against welfare entitlements or unemployment benefits for the alleged indolent legions that have found themselves out of work since 2008. On the Internet, popular websites clandestinely snap photos at mega stores frequented by the permanent underclass for the sole purpose of snickering derisively at the less fortunate. From an insular perch somewhere in the nation’s suburbs, the children of the elite (and perhaps what’s left of the middle class) laugh at the clothes, at the physical traits, at the behavior of a class of people that, to them, must seem like some sort of fiction. After all, who needs empathy when you’ve got luck or birthright on your side?

I live in a small town just outside of the Washington, DC metro area — far enough away to preclude it from being considered a true suburb, but close enough to still observe the proximate effects of being so near the wealthiest region of the country. Only recently have we seen an influx of government agencies into the area, and with it the flow of taxpayer money that eventually makes its way into the various (and nefarious) contractor coffers. Long before that subsidy, however, has existed a core of wealth that dates farther back than the Civil War.

More at the link ---