Last I checked, median income is actually 26k.
I won't deny the existence of white trash, but I also don't believe they deserve to die. It makes absolutely zero sense to let anybody, no matter who they are, go homeless and hungry while food and shelter also go to waste. Zero fucking sense.
We need to get past this deeply ingrained idea in our culture that a person doesn't deserve to live unless they work, more specifically unless they work at a "job". Lack of work is not the problem and neither is the lack of work ethic. Broken economics and corruption are entirely to blame.
I have intelligent and respectable college graduate friends who struggle to find any job, even for minimum wage. One of my friends was only able to get a job at Wal-Mart by earning a social favor with family of a manager there, where he had been previously turned down for being "over-qualified". And in a time when jobs are so hard to find, most families need two to get by.
There are two problems here. First, the concept of "jobs" in our society is total bullshit. Having a job does not necessarily mean you contribute anything to society, which I understand to be the basis of the assumption that if you don't have a job that you aren't earning your keep. A job means only one thing: making profit for somebody wealthier than you. Second, our society is so productive that not everybody needs to work, or everybody needs to work very little. There are a large and ever-increasing number of jobs out there right now that are complete wastes of time that benefit nobody, and only exist because need to have even a worthless "job" to justify their own existence.
I'll use my job as an example. I work for the customs brokerage wing of a major shipping corporation. My job provides absolutely zero tangible benefit to society. I contribute to the shifting around of numbers in a giant imaginary number game. My contribution is that I take specific bits of information from one document and copy them into another document. That is how I spend 40 hours every week. If my job didn't exist, there would be no less production of stuff in the world, and stuff would actually have an easier time getting around to wherever it needs to go. Even assuming my job is worth anything, it could be eliminated almost effortlessly by part restructuring and part automation. Finally, people do everything they can to prevent this worthless job from being eliminated.
My job exists for only a couple stupid reasons. First, tariffs exist for the manipulation of markets, the merits of which are an entirely different debate. More importantly, massive overbearing amounts of fluff paperwork continually build up around this process, to the point that special education and a license is required to process it. An individual can extend that license to people working under them, as is done where I work. I process this paperwork, and the company charges customers a fee for that process. I have absolutely zero personal power to negotiate the terms of my employment, so I get paid an incredibly small portion of the revenue my work generates. My manager and I have crunched the numbers together before, and determined that I make my entire year's salary worth of profit for the company in about a week on average. My job is an absolutely miserable experience and a horrible waste of human life and potential, and I would seriously choose to live in a box instead if I didn't have a family to care for. I've complained openly about how the conditions of the workplace or pay should be adjusted, or about how the work itself is worthless and should at least be automated. Everybody agrees but then hushes me down aggressively, because they are too afraid of endangering their job and thus their ability to justify their own survival in this society.
And there is the core of the issue. We are a population trapped in a cycle of exploitation. We are forced to impoverish ourselves by funneling wealth upward into the hands of those already wealthier than ourselves, under the threat that if we don't we will be absolutely impoverished into nothing on the spot. This is what a "job" is. Jobs should not be so worshipped in our culture and politics, nor pursued as an end unto themselves. Work should be done because it accomplishes something beneficial. When work is finished or otherwised becomes obsolete, that should be a good thing for everyone. Against all logic, that is exactly the opposite of how things are in our world today.
As long as we continue living this way, we could bury the world in food and it wouldn't matter. The nature of our system is such that there would still be a class of people legally barred from partaking of the food going to waste literally all around them, because it all belongs to people who only share when it fetches a profit. This an extreme example, but it's directly analogues to what is going on in the world today. IIRC, there are 6 empty homes for every homeless person, and the majority of the food we produce goes to waste. In these circumstances, who fucking cares if white trash don't go out of their way to make rich people richer? Let them fucking have whatever's going to waste anyway. To think that they should die instead is just plain bloodthirsty.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 720634 times)