One labor leader thinks he has the answer:
I am going to talk tonight about anger—and specifically the anger of working people. I want to explain why working people are right to be mad about what has happened to our economy and our country, and then I want to talk about why there is a difference between anger and hatred. There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President and heroes like Congressman John Lewis. Most of all, those forces of hate seek to divide working people – to turn our anger against each other.
I am not sure I completely buy this, it seems like most the terrorist wannabe tea-baggers are retired indaviduals collecting social security, my guess is there anger is more from the idea that the country has a black president and most people don’t hate gays the way they do. He then goes on to say:
For a generation, our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age, work is something someone else does. Someone we never met far away in an export processing zone will make our clothes, immigrants with no rights in our political process or workplaces will cook our food and clean our clothes.
And for the lucky top 10 percent of our society, that has been the reality of globalization—everything got cheaper and easier.
But for the rest of the country, economic reality has been something entirely different. It has meant trying to hold on to a good job in a grim game of musical chairs where every time the music stopped, there were fewer good jobs and more people trying to get and keep one. Over the last decade, we lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs—a million of them professional and design jobs. We lost 20 percent of our aerospace manufacturing jobs. We’re losing high-tech jobs—the jobs we were supposed to keep.
My guess is that these jobs are gone and they are not coming back until Americans agree to work cheaper, and even if the jobs do come back they will probably not pay as well; which makes me think people are going to have to consume less, and perhaps look for meaningful work that doesn’t pay as well. I guess you can be angry about the situation but it might be better live in a smaller house, drive a smaller car and maybe have a smaller family and enjoy what life has to offer.