Garbage Bailout

I hope people don’t read this as a celebration or defense of the economy under Joe Biden so much as how it’s intended: as an attack on poor, white trash and demented geezers who complain about that economy while sending all their welfare and Social Security checks to Donald Trump.

Despite my choice of words, there, it isn’t intended to attack anybody simply for being impoverished or elderly and reliant on government assistance to survive, either. In most cases, the conditions that put people into those circumstances are too far beyond their control to blame them for it, and even if they weren’t, that doesn’t make their struggles to afford basic living expenses unimportant or undeserving of empathy and aid. The responsibility—even the purpose—of society is to provide all of its members with a basic standard of living and comfort which our present, so-called “civilization” unfortunately does not prioritize over monstrous profits for an elite few, after all.

Time and again, political establishments that should have known better have ignored the realities of ordinary people’s everyday experiences and legitimate cries for help, enabling authoritarian con-men to fill the vacuum with an atmosphere of hatred and suspicion directed at convenient, arbitrary scape-goats who had nothing to do with the problem, and often were victims of it, themselves.

Hitler seized upon public resentment of the Treaty of Versailles, as well as the economic harm wrought by the ludicrous reparations it required, to cultivate the Nazi Party and advance his own racist agenda against Jews, Slavs, and anyone else he and his allies deemed “subhuman.”

A recession Jimmy Carter inherited from his Republican predecessors, followed by a drop in global oil production which resulted in an energy crisis near the end of his term, fueled Ronald Reagan’s campaign against “welfare queens.” This allowed Reagan to gut social programs in order to fund tax breaks and subsidies to corporations and the wealthy, essentially robbing the poor to feed the rich.

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 brought about long-term unemployment rates which hadn’t been seen since the Great Depression, with unemployment in the United States continuing to grow until at least mid-2011. Many were still suffering its effects until 2016 and beyond—consider what a lengthy employment gap often does to a person’s job prospects and projected income afterwards—but Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign and its surrogates generally hand-waved these types of concerns to focus on racial justice issues instead, even going so far as to imply that it was racist to discuss economic inequality as long as racial inequality remained a thing.

It wasn’t that the former Goldwater Girl genuinely cared that much more about racial justice, either—no, no! Instead, it was a cynical attempt to cash in on the Black Lives Matter movement while distracting from the fact that many of those responsible for the Recession were amongst her most treasured financial backers and friends.

This ultimately left Donald Trump free to copy Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons by blaming illegal immigrants, while also copying Hitler with hoary allusions to “you know who,” and then sloppily gobble up the fruit sown for decades by Democrats’ stubborn declarations that “it’s a two-party system! You have to vote for one of us!”

You can’t really fault people for being upset about this, but you can fault them for any idiotic, self-defeating, or hateful actions they take in response. If, for example, someone chooses to express his frustration by attending a prominent white supremacist’s rally, and then catches fatal consequences as a direct result of being there, that’s something to mock rather than mourn.

“Hey, let’s give that Nazi thing a try” is never a responsible decision to make as either an individual, a husband, or a father. There’s plenty of history and other available information at this point to make that painfully obvious. Even their own flag is just four Ls arranged in a circle, for crying out loud!