Why don’t I like rich white people as a stereotype?
Rich white people run the government.
Rich white people run the Congress.
Rich white people own most of the big business and banks.
Big business is owned by big banks. Big banks trade in businesses that pollute the planet and make it unlivable for almost everyone else. Companies those banks trade in also reduce individual liberties by operating as anti-democratic authorities towards their employees, therefore concentrating both power and wealth from their consumers and workers.
Big business then buys members of Congress through legal bribery, often drafting their legislation FOR them. Makes you wonder why the Congress - made up of mostly of lawyers - included all of those loopholes? They couldn’t have all been on GHB and cheated their entire way through law school, could have they?
Congress cuts funding to the states. States privatize their public resources. Resources such as schools, emergency services, infrastructure, and now mass public surveillance.
Public employees - those naughty unaccountable bureaucrats we all like to remind ourselves and others aren’t democratically elected - are replaced with replaceable non-Union employees at a steal - like the South Bend Cubs - who replaced moonlighting firefighters with inmates from the South Bend Reentry Center. And this is nothing against them. I’ve worked alongside men from that Center. They work, laugh, share, and debate with as much conviction as any firefighter I know.
Firefighters know their worth. And so do The Cubs. And they know the monetary worth of the fellas at the reentry center. And so do I. Less than minimum wage thanks to the 13th amendment which permits legal slavery for criminals of the state. That means the Cubs are doin em a favor. Moreover the state takes nearly 60% of their wages for a victims recovery fund, administered by private charities. And now you know the value that’s been placed on them too.
States and local governments continue to privatize formally public spaces and institutions where they do not have to abide by the constitution. The 1st amendment applies only to the government’s infringement thereupon its citizens. Private business on government contracts hire people for less while the, the owners collect more. More profits, more tax money, none of which to be paid back into the community.
Business leaders and government officials from our locality to the Supreme Court play musical chairs between private and public while their handshakes carve the country up further.
Why do I dislike rich white people as a stereotype? Because this back and forth horse trading of people and natural resources is funded and maintained by the American military and the CIA, ran by rich white businessmen, who throughout their history have worked with and trained far right, often fascist militias when then execute brutal dictatorial takeovers of democratically elected leaders in mostly brown and black countries.
The CIA pays for its spy warfare by brokering drug shipments from places like Latin America, China, and Afghanistan to poor communities all throughout the United States. They’re good friends over at the FBI then set up, arrest, and sometimes assassinate black leaders who try and improve their communities or expose the government’s lies and corruption.
Why does the mafia exist? So the government can look upon its own reflection and lose itself long enough to say “Boo!”
All of this is going on at the same time the lady at JoAnnes is holding up the forming line over a 20% discount with a designer purse in hand. No awareness to anyone in the world around her. An independent agent interacting with a bunch of non-playable characters. Why are they non-playable? They or people around them, we’ll intended as they may have acted, have likely bought them out of and sheltered them from the realities of anyone that doesn’t look or play the part.
Is she aware of everything I have described that afforded the lifestyle our society is clamoring for? She’s not aware of the family of four behind her, nor the 6 or 7 other families who, despite their own busy and complicated lives, haven’t rang this woman’s neck. Civility at its best.
Civility keeps our feelings from getting hurt in public but it also is the veil that the powerful owners of this country hide behind and have used to justify murdering anyone who didn’t give up that which they wanted and couldn’t buy at a fraction of its worth from the locals.
Whether it be in speeches, media, or by the stories that have been gifted to me directly, the most repeated compliant I have heard from members of the American Indian Nations of what is often called the “White Nation” is one of broken promises and betrayal through crafty language and ruthless enforcement of confusing laws and treaties. All perpetrated by a civil people.
And I project all of that on to so many of the customers and visitors that look and play the part if you will at the upper-middle-class farmer’s market. On my observant days the view and distance affords me time to reorient myself to the approaching patron.
They don’t know I am thinking all of this. Because I am. Sometimes I think it’s a sense of entitlement that does it for me. In them or in me is up for grabs. The eye however cannot see itself, and I am not sure what faces I make. Though I have been told I am a terrible poker player.
I suppose I get angry because I assume the people with money should have time to investigate what facilitated that wealth. Perhaps they know and they are a full partner in the suffering of others. Perhaps they are asleep if you will. Just as many people I worked with that were poorly educated who were exhausted and would accept low hanging fruit such as their problems were because of unions, blacks, gays, or women. Too tired to wonder why those narratives were tolerated by management but questioning the boss was a sure-fire way to discipline or termination.
Or too tired to care. Whatever the reason, if given enough time I begin to see two sides of the same coin and in the same way myself. That is to say the Hitler - the fascist - that lies inside myself and the focus of my anger towards what I regard as faulty thinking. Who guards the guards?
In my own right I was poor and dirty, rich and dirty, now poor and disorganized. A recovering bureaucrat I seek the necessary precision of government work I likely disassociated with some of the more vivid memories of how those tools kept myself and sometimes other people alive.
You’d think I love rich white men. If what I have to say is truly valuable, those banks i disdain so much would have to hold some of that money. I can’t keep it all buried in the backyard.
My distrust of the government doesn’t change the melanin in my skin, either. Besides, Nixons domestic policy guy let the cat out of the bag on that one. It was never about race for them. It was about money and power.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
-John Ehrlichman, Domestic Policy Chief under Richard Nixon
This institutional inbreeding of tumor-like growth has traded culture for convenience and outsourced everything uncomfortable to whoever is casted into it’s Indeed queries and their oversees equivalents.
It’s conflated our understanding of equanimity and replaced it’s measure of value by “better us then them.” Dog eat dog to eliminate tribalism. And it retains a class of people to keep the coal fires burning so the dancing can continue on the ballroom floor all night. And everybody collapses in the morning. Except the workers who start their second jobs cleaning up the messes from the night before.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making a direct affront to white people. I get like this around anyone who defends those narratives with soft language they can’t back up and promises they can’t keep. George Carlin talked about how soft language was that which takes the life out of life. He said in the West we as Americans use soft language to bullshit ourselves out of the uncomfortable realities of life.
The West isn’t a race, as much as the American Republican establishment would like us to believe. The West is an ideology, it is a lifestyle.. And where I am often situated I get a lot of examples of people who share some of my ancestry but none of my shopping locations or interactions with the welfare office.
I remember that on the ambulance I would be screamed at by people I sympathized with. Lied to by people I identified with. Spit on by people who grew up near me. They didn’t know me and I was another guy with a badge.
After countless happenings of the like I remain yet I find myself angry at sight of someone who pays a little extra for vegetables they don’t know what to do with? They are literally throwing money at me. I can be polite to them and disagree with them, right?
When I am unable to see the present moment without it being clouded needlessly by my past experiences, I am often doublebound by or compelled to ascribe those experiences to the present moment, same-same.
Those experiences are this: I have been into the homes of the rich and powerful when their kids overdosed on Fentanyl, or their breadwinner died of the very cancers that bring death to the poor same-same. I have been in bedrooms and the most intimate spaces. This is not a privilege I abused mind you. I have never invaded spaces that weren’t open to the eye, but I am a very observant person. And I listen to conversations. I’m a people watcher.
The people who make and enforce the rules are the ones who break them in greatest earnest.
The judges, the politicians, the useful zealots, the enforcers all hide behind their optics and attempt to deny or obscure their own human shadows on one hand while on the other condemning or using their power to prevent other people from expressing themselves. They don’t want to look in that mirror.
I took notice of this when I was a child, observing the behaviors of my teachers in school and the parishioners in my grandmother’s church. They were all walking contradictions but they wouldn’t admit it. And the more power they had over people - perceived or realized - the more brutal their reaction would be when faced with their contradictions.
What does this mean for my bias towards rich white people? That I have seen myself caught in my own contradictions enough times that I know that I know very little about the individual articulations of someone. And though I may be right about all of the things about their behaviors or of their ignorance my ignorance lies in thinking I can sum them up in the assessment of one or two of the senses. Tools of measurement. That sounds like something TikTok boasts doesn’t it? Do we really want to cozy up to an app that thinks so little of us that it can know everything about us in the span of a few minutes?
When I catch myself engaging in this trope without pretense or necessity I feel like the big bag of shit I project onto the assholes that sum me up in a similar manner. In such dizzying web of transference and countertransference I am reminded of words I have heard from elders I admire:
Freedom is the ability, the skill to do something different during unchanging circumstance.
We are all walking contradictions my friends. Wake up. Contradict yourself. Your assumptions, your thought patterns, your actions. It flows this way in the opposite direction too.