Working Class Heroes

I get it, I really do. I’ve always been working class; I’ll always be working class. If one of my books was turned into a movie or I won the lottery (both equally unlikely) I’d still work on cars and enjoy digging holes on the hottest summer day, welding stuff, banging nails. I love fixing things, improving on a design, manual labor will always satisfy something deep inside me. It’s generational. It’s defining.

I’m dyed in the wool working class. That truth matters to me deeply, but it’s equally part of my struggle with the world I live in. I know guys, some I consider friends, who work hard at physical labor that rivals any chain-gang. These guys can barely afford health care for themselves or their kids. Their old cars and trucks are always falling apart. They feed their kids cheap junk, and a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle would be a step up. Truthfully, the paycheck on Friday doesn’t quite make it to the following Tuesday. They always live in a hole, a deficit. I get it. Some are in their fifties, and the body is betraying them. I hope they can somehow limp into retirement. Most doubt they can afford to, I doubt they can either.

I understand their anger when they see people getting food stamps and welfare and free phones. I get it when their anger rages about someone who crossed the border into Texas getting better healthcare than their shit job offers them and their kids. I get it all…

What I don’t get, what I’ll never understand or even grasp, is how these guys, eating their bologna sandwiches and drinking their discount store beer, somehow see the billionaires, the politicians as their saviors. That these multi-millionaires and billionaire politicians are out there working for them, that they have got their backs. The only reason billionaire capitalists don’t still have six-year-olds working in their factories is it became illegal to do so, and unions had a lot to do with that. The unions’ day in the sun has passed now, but that seems to be ok, because I have my favorite politician’s bumper sticker on my truck, much like I used to have my Yankees or Red Sox sticker there. They choose now to spend the days now screaming loyalty to their political team. But it ain’t your team, it’s their team. The ball team’s flag has been replaced by some politician’s flag and no one screams how goddamn dangerous that is.

This isn’t a right vs. left rant; this is a rant about the bait that dangles before us every day and has been swallowed to the hook. How we see any of them as having our backs, and that they care about you. It’s about the guy who works on his knees every day installing flooring, driving his twenty-year-old pickup who calls himself a capitalist. Dude, you ain’t. You ain’t even. But we swallow it all, and we fight amongst ourselves and have Thanksgiving Day arguments and families splinter… it’s ridiculous and appalling. There are incontrovertible facts staring at us in the face we refuse to see. Like how keeping machine guns away from crazy people or making insulin affordable so hard working taxpayers don’t die is a bridge too far, a mountain too high to climb. But boy, they got your back, yessir.

A friend of mine is a communist. A Cuban, hard-core, Marxist. He’s taught me a lot, but even he sees Communism in the hands of power and greed and money is as flawed as a system as Capitalism.

These people you see as your savior are keeping you walking in chains, and you seem to need to thank them for your shackles.

Sometimes when I look at the facade and think about what’s really going on beneath it, my heart breaks. I think the generation is here now, walking among us that will never understand the myth of our greatness, but will lead very different and more difficult and challenging lives than we have known.

I may be dyed in the wool working class, but I’ll be goddamned if I’ll ever swear allegiance or fealty to any man or institution.

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill