The Snarling Underclass - White Trash Hurricane

 

There’s an element to American society that I’ve always thought of as “the snarling underclass.” They are the ones who aren’t exactly caught in the grinding poverty of the unemployed and the destitute. Instead, theirs is a different kind of poverty, a poverty that includes owning their own homes and a car or two, and having at least some employment, even if it means missing a few meals now and then, and being chronically late on various payments. Maybe the cable or the power gets shut off for a week or two every year during the slow time.

They’re wealthy enough to feel discontent. They aren’t starving, they aren’t living in the streets, but they’re barely getting by. Rather than making their own entertainment, they can listen to country and heavy metal on their MP3 players, and they can watch NASCAR on the cable.

They’re just high enough up that they can sneer at black people, but low enough to be uncomfortably aware that black people can take their jobs. They have just enough to feel they have a stake in capitalist America, but still have trouble paying the bills. And gawd knows what they’ll do if one of the kids get sick or dad has a heart attack.

In a land of plenty, where they supposedly have the advantages, they don’t have enough. And this translates into a simmering resentment. It permeates their lives, even if it exists as a background hum. It emerges as a resentment against intellectuals and the schools that failed them (or in which they failed themselves); against members of less privileged groups that are doing better than they are (“Of course they gave the job to an unqualified woman! They gotta follow those liberal rules!”). Even as they fail to share the benefits of privilege, they feel a searing resentment against the people they see as taking that privilege away, in the form of affirmative action, in laws that specify that other groups – blacks, gays, Hispanics – have exactly the same rights that they have (translated to “special rights”). In a place of prosperity, they are not prospering, and they are continually looking for someone to blame. 

full article at:

http://zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/underclass.htm