Forsetti’s Justice makes basically the same point that I make, but goes further on why facts don’t matter to the white working class, especially the religious right white working class: They basically have created their own bubble universe where any facts from outside are rejected. It doesn’t matter how much outreach we do to these religious white working class types. They will reject anything that does not reflect what they believe and what they want to believe.
The reality is that you can’t get by on what is equivalent to an 8th grade education on the world stage anymore and have a middle class lifestyle. Yet the white working class continues to sneer at intellectuals, dismiss education beyond what’s needed to read the Bible as Satan’s work, refuses to enlarge their horizons beyond God, guns, and family. Even their smart kids don’t go on to college, and the uptake for job retraining programs amongst the older laid-off workers is abysmal, and of those who do go through the job retraining programs, only 0.5% are willing to relocate to where the jobs are.
Meanwhile, the brown working class goes where the jobs are, accepts those jobs, works hard at those jobs, and votes for the Democrats who make their lives easier. And the white working class hates them for all of that. And there isn’t a bloody thing us liberals can do about that, because we’re outside the trilogy of God, guns, and family and thus are “the enemy”. We encourage their children to get an education, which makes us “the enemy” because too much education ends up with their children rejecting their bigotry and closed-mindedness. We push knowledge that they don’t want upon them, knowledge like evolution and cosmology that doesn’t comport with what their preachers tell them and what their Bible tells them so that makes us wicked and evil.
What they want back, in the end, is the 19th century. Their problem is, in the end, the 21st century. They don’t like it, they don’t want it, and they vote for anybody who says they can go back to when all they needed was a strong back and a closed mind to get ahead. And anybody who doesn’t tell them that is The Enemy. And since liberals can’t tell them that — because it just isn’t true — they view liberals as The Enemy, and always will, and that’s just how it is.
– Badtux the Former Working Class Penguin
Well fuck them blind then. Let ’em get left behind in the race to the modern world like the “let’s go back to the 7th Century” Muslimaniacs dying for their fakaliphate in searin’ Syria. Their lives can be pot-bellied, toothless meth-addicted things that end sooner than civilised peoples’. They’re going to drag a lot of good people down with them, but as a whole the religious white fuckwits will die before decent folks. ‘Course, I can be blithe about that because I’m a 0.5%er who moved a long way for a job with my retrained career, to a place where “knowledge” isn’t a dirty word. Although there are forces trying to ape the monkeybrains in Amonkeyerica.
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Back in the mid 80’s I took a job in ‘rural America’, even though it was in North/Central Ca. I had been raised in Berkeley and spent many years in Humboldt County and Nothing prepared me for Red Bluff Ca. I had never seen people be “Anti Education” in my life. “It was good enough for Grampa so it’s still good enough for me” seems to be a Mantra. Racism was a way of life, women were rated on their visual ‘specifications’. Etc.
As a ‘city kid’ I had at best (worst?) read of these kinds of bozos, but here was an entire town full of them, and here in my “liberal” California???
I had thought that ‘awareness and liberal thinking was spreading since my awakening in the mid 60’s.
Red Bluff taught me otherwise.
“They are ignorant, and Proud of it”
The democratic party has no chance in that climate.
I had once thought ‘Education’ to be the answer we needed but if education
is looked upon as a ‘tool of the rich’ then, we have really lost. “They’ have really stacked the deck in this way.
Don’t know the answer, but that “fly over state’ attitude is really wide spread.
w3ski
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You know, it might actually be right and good and proper to exploit these people right up to the point of their doom. I might have to look into that.
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Yeah, and I know I didn’t get the exploitation idea first. Great guns and ammo sure are cheap now, right?
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