Sayonara Suckers!

In the beginning, God created the Earth and he stocked it with enough materials and natural resources for its population to live to all live on it together… if not exactly soft life in all cases… at least a reasonably decent one.

Today the 85 (yeah, 85, 15 less than 100) richest people own more of the planets wealth and resources than the entire poorest 3.5 BILLION (uh huh, with a “B”) people… HALF the world’s population… combined. In other words, they have Hoarded more than half of the resources that were put there for all of us for themselves, taking it out of circulation and storing it in places where it will not have to be shared with anyone.

I have found nothing in my New Testament… nothing in the teachings of Jesus Christ… that would indicate that either the creator or the savior intended it to be that way or that these 85 people are… as some of them have outright claimed… doing “God’s work”.

I find the amazing thing about all this to be the number of ORDINARY people who not only see nothing wrong with it but are more than willing to play a smaller version of the game themselves, hoarding their own nickles and dimes… at least until the sharks at the top of the food chain get around to them and then it too will be gone like a fart in a whirlwind. For some reason, the middle glass still honestly believes that as soon as the poor, the disabled, the elderly have all been dispatched to the poor house or the debtor’s jail or the cemetery… that those same 85 people won’t be coming for the middle class itself next.

That’s the way it works in shark city. First you eat all the little fish. The helpless little minnows that spend so much of their energy just trying to survive they have no strength left over to fight back. Not a lot of meat on a minnow granted but there ARE millions of minnows and all those morsels add up to a pretty good meal before it’s done.

At that point, the middle fish have a choice to make. They can join with the millions of little fish and put things back to rights and insure once again that there’s enough that even if we can’t all be rich, nobody has to go homeless and hungry… or they can toady up to the sharks, counting on them dropping enough crumbs so that the middle fish can continue to live their comfortable little suburban lives with minimum disruption to their ball games, car races and cheapjack reality TV shows as possible.

Believe me, middle class Americans have never had to think too long or hard about which side of THAT equation they wanted to be on. During the 80s and 90s, they managed to make a pretty comfortable living herding little fish into the jaws of the Great Whites on Wall Street in return for their own pristine little lives continuing to run as smoothly as possible. All of a sudden, people who had themselves been raised for at least part of their lives on public assistance… indeed some who until a relatively short time earlier had themselves been raising their own kids with the assistance of the taxpayers… now that it was time to start giving some of it back… suddenly became real righteous about whose money that was and how they earned it and nobody was “entitled” to it but them.

Of course it didn’t help the sudden case of cognitive balloon gas that overwhelmed the senses of your average working class right wing American that at literally every juncture in their mundane little lives there was a Wall Street propagandist more than ready to reinforce the dogma should the faithful begin to falter. They permeated the government, the media, the universities… indeed it was virtually impossible to go for more than a waking hour in any given day without seeing some childishly scribbled misspelled poster or hear some snake oil peddling bought and paid for politician or see some broken down old has been “celebrity” mumbling, “The poor are your enemies. Kill the poor. The poor are your enemies. Kill the poor”.

So they joyously swam around herding the minnows into great shoals and schools where they would be easy pickings for the big dudes and sucking up their crumbs in some kind of weird parody of the shark’s own feeding frenzy and every two, four or six years voted faithfully to renew the patina of respectability emanating from free elections in

But eventually there comes a day when all the little fish have been picked clean. Between the big fish and their middle sized lackeys, they’ve picked those minnows right down to the bare bones, nothing but a bunch of fishy looking little skeletons kinda just drifting around sinking into the primordial ooze. And there’s this weird thing about sharks, you see. They don’t quit being hungry just because the appetizers are all gone. And suddenly the middle sized fish look up at the big fish dons and capos standing there with these little smirks on their faces and they say, “That was great! Who do we go after next, boss?”. “Boss?” “BOSS????”

And that’s when the little tiny light bulb flashes a couple of times in their middle sized fishy heads and they look around to see who the sharks are eyeballing behind them with that hungry look on their faces and there ain’t nobody there. At that point, some of the more literary minded mind find themselves feeling a little “Hemingwayed” as in “Ask not for whom the dinner bell tolls chump. That’s right, it tolls for you.”.

First stage of course, is denial. If the American middle class is good at any one thing above all others it’s denial. They can deny louder and longer than perhaps any other species in the known universe. A shark could gnaw half of one of their legs off and they’d still be denying it was happening. Then comes. “It must be some kind of mistake. They wouldn’t do that to me after all the compromising and ass kissing I’ve been doing this past thirty three years.

That’s the stage we’re in now. They still think all they have to do is send a couple of stern tweets or threaten to vote for someone else three years down the road and the members of that wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries we call our government will do an instant 180 and elect to starve to death (or at least go back to having to live within the means of someone of their arrested mental development) rather than eat the other leg. Right. THAT’S gonna happen.

Nope my middle class friend… you might as well change your name to lunch because your former buddies are still hungry and there ain’t nobody left out there but you. And as I’ve said before, I can’t be sure I’m not going to enjoy… at least just a little bit… seeing you drifting down into the muck here at the bottom of the pond and hearing you crying to the bitter end that it can’t be happening to you because your the MIDDLE CLASS goddammit.

What your forgetting is that once you’ve helped eliminate the lower class, you automatically BECOME the lower class and the only ones that are going to survive the continuing feeding frenzy are those 85 people we spoke about at the top of this piece and they already have it divided up among themselves. Sayonara, sucker!
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