“People ask why the left is so angry: it’s because We understand how it is, We understand how it could be and We understand why it never will.”
I saw this on Facebook this morning, a comment from my new favorite British writer.
I can’t say I understand everything Steve Carter writes. He knows a lot more about American culture than I do about life in the U.K., even though I’d say I’m probably in the 90th percentile or above of Americans when it comes to what’s happening in the home of my ancestors.
Of course, even though the U.K. is a much smaller country than the U.S., my forebears were from the far south, nearly as far as you can go without hitting water, and never made it north of London. Whitcombe is 2 miles southeast of Dorchester and as of 2013 had a population of 20.
Steve lives much father north. In addition, my people emigrated to Massachusetts in the middle of the 17th century.
Still, I’m pretty much an Anglophile, and Steve is one of the two or three people on Facebook whose posts I am truly happy to see. I know he’ll say something challenging with an underlying intelligence.
The above post was one of those.
“People ask why the left is so angry …”
Why indeed?
I can’t speak for any country in the world other than my own, but I live in a country where the very richest among us are soaking up more and more of our national treasure for themselves. And while people at the bottom have always lived lives of desperation, that desperation is climbing higher and higher up the social ladder.
Something like 70 percent of American families are basically just getting by. Most of them are in the position where if they had an unexpected expense of $3,000, the only way they could pay it is to borrow the money.
“It’s because we understand how it is …”
Here’s a big part of the problem. At least in this country, we don’t understand how it really is. We have a tendency to assume that our lives are basically average and that rich people aren’t that much better off than we are.
In other words, we’re stupid.
Actually, this is one of the few areas in which television has had some positive effect. One of the reasons there were so many riots in urban ghettoes in the 1960s was that until then, a lot of the people in those ghettoes thought life was pretty much the same everywhere.
Even in the early television shows like “The Honeymooners,” Ralph and Alice Kramden lived in a tenement apartment. Ralph was a bus driver and his friend Ed Norton worked in the sewers. Ricky and Lucy Ricardo had it better in “I Love Lucy,” but they still lived in an apartment that was anything but luxurious.
But with the coming of shows like “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” families were shown in beautiful suburban homes and green neighborhoods (even though they were shades of gray on TV). In “Hazel,” the show was actually about a family that had a full-time maid.
Yes, people actually started to understand how it is.
“We understand how it could be …”
The problem is, at least in the U.S., we don’t understand how it could be. We could look at Western Europe and see that average folks have medical insurance, that they get 4-6 weeks of paid vacation a year and that they have a government-run retirement plan that means they don’t have to eat cat food and bundle up because we can’t afford to heat our homes in the winter.
I can hear you now.
“But that’s socialism!”
“Socialism” may be the most misunderstood and intentionally distorted word in the English language.
Actually, if you think about it, socialism grows out of one of the oldest and earliest lessons in the Bible.
We are our brothers’ keeper.
There are very few people I know and respect who don’t think we should have at least some level of looking out for the weaker and worse-off among us, and for a while we were actually doing it. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs actually reduced the percentage of Americans living below the poverty level from 29 percent to 15 percent.
Then along came Ronald Reagan … and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K.
Which brings us to …
… and We understand why it never will.
Reagan and Thatcher killed something in our two countries, and the only thing Reagan did better was that he did it with a smile.
Reagan played to people’s ignorance. He told them that all he wanted to do was get the government out of the way so they could succeed on their own. He said the scariest words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Thatcher at least was honest in her evil.
“There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”
Why will it never change?
Because there are too few people like the woman in the picture above.
Because the very wealthy will never surrender their position unless they are forced to.
As 19th century robber baron Jay Gould was reputed to have said:
“I can pay half of the working class to kill the other half.”
That’s no reason not to try, but we have to be happy with small gains.
Either that or an apocalypse.