A Discontented, Lazy Rabble?
Or, the hardest working people in America?
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Note: Everything in this post is my personal opinion. If you don’t agree, set up your own Substack. Or, leave me a comment.
Please bear with me while I start this column by going off on a little tangent.
One of my favorite Christmas movies is “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The villain is Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore at the age of 68.
By today’s standards he looks much older than that.
Mr. Potter is a pretty one-dimensional character with basically no back-story. Barrymore brilliantly plays him as a bitter old skinflint with absolutely no scruples1 who’s only joy in life is the acquisition of money and power.
And it doesn’t seem to bring him much joy.
I’m almost certainly overthinking it, but I get the impression he comes from “old money”, born into wealth, and he needs to be able to look down on people of lesser means in order to justify his supremacist attitude towards other human beings.
Here is one of my all time favorite scenes from the movie:
I’m struck by Potter’s assumption, one could call it projection, that the only reason George Bailey lent money to his friend Ernie was because they were friends.
My suspicion is that Potter doesn’t really have any friends that aren’t bought and paid for.
But again, I may be overthinking.
In my humble opinion Bailey’s monologue in response is pure gold. If you’ve never seen it click on the graphic above to play a YouTube clip from the movie.
If you have seen it, play it anyway. If you’re anything like me it’ll lift your spirts, at least for a while.
Potter reminds me of many of the people who are currently in charge of this country.
Our current Convict in Chief was born into wealth. I’ve heard it described as being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.2
I used the word “supremacist” earlier very consciously. Supremacists don’t believe, as the US Declaration of Independence says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. [emphasis mine]
The majority of the Republican Party as currently constituted appears to believe that some people (mostly white Christians in the top 10% of wealth distribution) are just better than other human beings.
If you were born into poverty instead of wealth, that’s your fault. Any “handouts” from the government; i.e. SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, Head Start, children’s programming on PBS, public schools, etc.; will make you “dependent on the government”.
I.e. a social safety net results in a “discontented lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class”, as Potter says.
I think a better way to look at safety net programs is assisting working families and their children in making a better life for themselves.
The fact is that over the last several decades our Federal and State governments have systematically been tearing up the social safety net in order to free up funds to provide tax breaks for the super rich and large corporations.
In my own state, California, in the 80s Ronald Reagan shut down state mental institutions, promising to open local clinics where folks suffering from mental illness could receive low-cost care near their homes.
The local clinics didn’t happen. Who could have predicted that?
Over time this short-sighted action led directly to the homeless crisis in California cities, with mentally ill people sleeping on sidewalks or in filthy encampments, at least until they get kicked out by the police.
Regan also started cutting funding for state colleges and universities.
When I attended San Diego State College the biggest expenses were housing, food, transportation and books. There was no tuition.
Today tuition and fees will cost more than $9,000 per academic year if you’re a full-time student.
In 1967-68 it cost Dad around $2,000 to house and feed me at San Diego State for one academic year.
If SDS had the equivalent tuition at that time it would have added another $1,000 to that expense.
As it was he had to take a second job to help pay for my first year of college. Bumping the cost up by 33% would have put college out of reach for me.
I didn’t find out what a financial bind my first year of college put my family in until years later. Now I wish I’d actually studied:
Fun and Games at the Top Party School in America
In my senior year of high school I applied to several colleges. Much to my surprise I was accepted by several of them in spite of my poor GPA. I took the ACT instead of the SAT (it was supposedly less challenging) and got a good score. Maybe that had something to do with it.
Because of my lackadaisical approach to college my three younger siblings were pretty much on their own after they graduated from high school.
I hereby apologize to my brother and both sisters.
Dad said, not completely joking, that as the oldest they made all their mistakes on me.
My point is (yes, I do have a point) that supremacist thinking doesn’t work in the long run.
Yes, a conservative Supreme Court can decide that money is speech, giving huge power to the super rich.
And if “conservatives” control the executive branch and both houses in the legislative branch, laws can be passed that shred the social safety net, give huge tax breaks to the super rich and corporations, make it harder to form or join a union, and add trillions of dollars to the national debt.
I fear that in the long run (maybe not so long) all this will cause the US economy to collapse.
It appears to me that we, as a country, are on the road to losing status as a superpower.
And it’s completely unnecessary.
If, instead of giveaways to the super rich, who don’t need them, we provided support to the poorest of the poor it would, as George Bailey says in the movie, “…make them better citizens, make them better customers…they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community…”.
The rich and the corporations they run have, over the last several decades, started putting profits for stockholders ahead of anything else. The don’t ever seem to look ahead beyond the next quarterly report.
But without the workers they’d be nowhere.
Is it too much to ask that they pay folks who work a full 40 hour week enough so they can afford housing near where they work without having to work multiple jobs?
And buy healthy food to feed themselves and their children? And maybe have a little left over to go out and have fun once in a while?
I strongly suspect that if the poorest of the working poor were paid for the true value of their labor they would be able to support a family on a single 40-hour-per-week income.
This would leave them time to read to their kids and help them with their homework, so that the kids do better in school.
Healthy, well fed educated kids could go on to college or a trade school and eventually get good jobs, contributing to the economy with their taxes and by supporting local small businesses.
And Amazon and Tesla.
But keep going the way things seem to be going and, it appears to me, the US will become a third world country, which would be bad for business.
But what do I know?
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Spoiler Alert: He steals a large sum of money from Uncle Billy in an effort to shut down the Bailey’s Building and Loan business, triggering George’s existential crisis.
I suspect I may have some readers who aren't baseball fans. Even so I think you can figure out my point from context.