The well off can afford see poverty as chic.

[undergroundpanther]

Only in America...Here we got upper middle class kids playing dress up..They dress up as poor folks,

Whit kids lurking at the upscale mall in suburbia..dressing up in a stereotype.. gangster pimp garb Spending mommies money for Bling at prices that a poor person in the city would pay for two months rent..


We got middle school girls playing dress up in crack whore chic in porn star shirts,who do not have to get screwed by strangers to feed an addiction that hooked you in desperate times an escape to numb the pain of a life unable to live....

Rich wannabe punk kids wearing torn pants ,but never want to think their creature comforts and designer poverty chic is all fake a pose..This is all the more offensive when they walk past a real gutter punk and smirk and make comments because he smells and is rummaging for food in a trash can,because the city thinks homeless people do not need showers and businesspeople by their actions tell homeless folks to hold their pee indefinitely until they get a job and a house..with a toilet.and that everyone should be forced to work to BUY food or starve even when nobody is hiring.

How sick that we have this culture that always caters to the whims those who have too much to care.. We are for the weathy the greedyy and predatory people who would use us and therow us away,more than we do for those who have nothing and need. This countries attitudes twords poverty are SICK and thier hearts are inverted..and it shows.


How ignorant of suffering the rich are allowed to be in their comfort bubbles.. Only a socially numb wealth enabled person, ignorant and well off could consider the cruelty of poverty,prostitution and addiction as kewel, a novelty and dress up..to take a slumming holiday...

I really despise this winner take all culture we have. This fuck the poor bullshit the wealthy thrive upon.Fuck the rich why not make them really live like the rest of us do.. instead of letting them have a lifelong holiday from poverty at our expense? We need a real safety net and the rich would rather have people suffer and be desperate enough to sell their bodies and lives to scrabble by than play fair and so the rich never risk having to ever go with less excess. Wealth that is used to enable the haves to ignore the suffering of others deprived so the rich can be insulated is not a human right or anything humane or sane for any culture.In fact unchecked wealth and growth for the few based on exploiting the many is a cause of corruption,it destroys human rights and dignity for all of us.

EAT THE RICH or they will destroy us all to save themselves from having to share the wealth..


WILLIAM SHATNER

Common People
(featuring Joe Jackson)


She came from Greece,
she had a thirst for knowledge.
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College.
That's where I caught her eye.

She told me that her Dad was loaded.
I said, in that case I'll have a rum and coca-cola.
She said fine, and in thirty seconds time she said,

I want to live like common people.
I want to do whatever common people do.
I want to sleep with common people.
I want to sleep with common people, like you.

Well, what else could I do?
I said, I'll see what I can do.

I took her to a supermarket.
I don't know why, but I had to
start it somewhere, so it started there.

I said, pretend you've got no money.
She just laughed, and said
oh you're so funny. I said, yeah?
Well, I can't see anyone else smiling in here.

Are you sure you want to live like common people?
You want to see whatever common people see?
You want to sleep with common people?
You want to sleep with common people, like me?
But, she didn't understand,


She just smiled and held my hand.

Rent a flat above a shop.
Cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool.
Pretend you never went to school.

But still, you'll never get it right.
When you're lying in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you called your Dad he could stop it all.
Yeah.


You'll never live like common people
You'll never do whatever common people do.
You'll never fail like common people.
You'll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw


because there's nothing else to do.


Sing along with the common people.
Sing along, and it might just get you thru.'


Laugh along with the common people.


Laugh along, even though they're laughing at you


and the stupid things that you do
'cause you think that poor is cool.


Like a dog lying in a corner,
they'll bite you and never warn you.
Look out.


They'll tear your insides out
'cause everybody hates a tourist.


'Cause Everybody hates a tourist,
especially one who thinks
it's all such a laugh.


Yeah, and the chip stains' grease
will come out in the bath.


You will never understand
how it feels to live your life
with no meaning or control
and with nowhere left to go.

You're amazed that they exist
and they burn so bright,
while you can only wonder why.

Rent a flat above a shop.
Cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool.
Pretend you never went to school.

But still, you'll never get it right.
'Cause When you're lying in bed at night


watching roaches climb the wall,
if you called your Dad he could stop it all.
Yeah.


You'll never live like common people


You'll never do what common people do.
You'll never fail like common people.
You'll never watch your life slide out of view
and dance and drink and screw
because there's nothing else to do.


I want to sing with common people, like you.
I want to sing with common people, like you.
I want to sing with common people, like you.

[getmeouttahere]

1. Great rant, undergroundpanther...

America just doesn't jive with what my heart tells me is right and just...I wish I had the ability to get out. Maybe I'll just start saving my money for that very purpose.

It isn't just about BushCo...it's about a sickness that this country has that is only exacerbated by BushCo...the belief that you can just keep consuming resources indefinitely, that you can just keep cutting taxes and that will create more jobs and we'll have full employment, that you can deny our children access to information about sex and deny birth control and preach abstinence, and that will make everything all right in our culture.

[Greyhound]

2. Beautiful, if only we could make them see.

And I'm with getmeouttahere, planning and saving for our exodus. Exit, stage left. :yoiks:

[getmeouttahere]

3. Exodus indeed....

and if your screen name that includes 1966 is an indication of your birth year, then we are about the same age (I was born in '65). What if we have no social security? What if we reach our fifties and no one will hire us anymore? They are talking about raising the social security age to 69. That's assuming there are any jobs, or jobs that pay enough so that we don't have to work 2 or 3. Unfortunately, I think that if you feel the way we do, you should prepare yourself to make that exodus. But will anyone take us?

[Greyhound]

4. keep it under your hat but, it's not that hard to emigrate to

the EU. I'm also told there's already a network in place to get to Canada.:yoiks:

[getmeouttahere]

5. Good to know, I'll take that under advisement....

Canada would be better, to make it easier to see my family, but I would not object to the EU at all. Network?

[Greyhound]

6. EU bottom line is "come with money" n/t

[undergroundpanther]

7. Thoughts?

Among us English-speaking peoples do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation of material attachments, the unbridled soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly -- the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.

I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William James (1842-1910)
The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902 (1961 translation)
Lectures 14-15
________________________________________________________________

There is a mistake in that pretty sounding appeal to nobility in suffering kind of quote above...(and people eat this shit up too)

I think what they should have been praising is a middle ground between wealth and poverty..A we all have enough state of balance that EQUALITY of wealth creates in societies when scarcity is held in check by sharing with all so NOBODY is made to be in a position of HAVING to be a slave of another person's control games to survive,live..have shelter..eat.Nobody has to fight to survive because we look out for each other.

Realistically I think I am doomed.People are not waking up quick enough..I will be hit before the middle and richer class feels enough pain to fight back against the richest and sociopathic.I get 500 bucks a a month disability..Fat chance I could afford to build a safe place, r afford a bribe to get out of here when I know a thousand other people with better gifts to wave in the face of corrupt gatekeepers would get chosen first.. I was born in 65. I really think civilization is gonna crash because we let the wealthy sociopaths steal it all from us.we took the leash off the powerful,we let them screw us.

People I have concluded are insane.They think suffering is a good guy badge one gets after death,they let abusers and con men use them ,lie,exploit them and make them suffer and die for peanuts and pretty words because they are all raised to be suckers with no self esteem and they are taught to believe some people are better deserving of a livable life than they are,They think and obey bosses and'leaders'like slaves.

They are duped by fantasy and make believe and never grow up..they are like children.. no wonder so many people look heavenward when the rich take wealth for themselves like bully children who think they are so damn mature taking candy from a smaller kid in an uncontrolled manner.


When will we ever learn all wealth is made by all of us together so it IS all of ours to share and be responsible for it? There is no elitism without the flip side belief that you are nothing,unworthy and deserve less and are powerless against the 'powers that be'.

I can't figure out a way out of my own situation.I have no job history. I cannot work because of trauma issues,No one would hire me anyways.I cannot sell myself because of my skills to another country.. artists and crafters are a dime a dozen.Who needs another?
And my problems interfere with my "productivity" and my coping skills with stress suck and I hate dealing with stupid busybody people... I am NOT a "people person" and do not trust ANY"authority figures".
I just can't cope with this fucked up world.

I live paycheck to paycheck.
I do not think I will get out of this coming cull initiated by the greedy fucks to save their own skins from the likes of us when we finally get painfully pinched out of never-land dreams and we wake the fuck up and PANIC and fight and tear each other apart to survive.
Evolution is not kind,the Earth will not stand for the rich parasites we will not control, and social darwinism is an invention that serves the rich anyways.

__________________________________________________________________

Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.
Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961)
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963


There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient -- and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and school teachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects...totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Brave New World, 1946
Revised Forward
Robertson Davies (b.1913)
Tempest-Tost, 1951

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. <...> The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
William Torrey Harris (1835-1909)
U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889
The Tyranny of Government Schooling
by John Gatto, 1992

~"If you do not specify and confront real issues,what you say will
surely obscure them .
If you do not alarm anyone morally you yourself remain morally asleep.
If you do not embody controversey what you say will be an acceptance of
the drift of a coming human hell."~
C.Wright Mills,The Power Elite.


We will no longer attempt to prove how reasonable we can be. We will go before them, face to face, to fight for our freedom.

"We will not be held hostage to their administrative efficiency. We will not keep to our place. We will never again be put away.
We are freedom fighters now.
And this is war."
-- Mouth Magazine


"One of the great delusions of our time is that a service system can produce care. All kinds of systems steal this human word. In doing that, they put the mask of love on the face of control."
-- John McKnight

"The great leader who is going to save is is not there.
We have to take the power and the responsibility to solve our own problems. We may not have created them, but it is up to us to solve them all."
Justin Dart


In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence.
Vaclav Havel (b.1936)
____________________________________________________________________
Hope these quotes are inspiring to you all. After I wrote I felt a wave of despair so I put the quotes here. I still feel despair.

[gorbal]

13. Don't give up hope for yourself.

You might research your options in other channels than you are now. There are people out there retireing and forming communities of older people collecting disability and retirement, and younger people to care for them. 500 a month is nothing in the city, but for an intentional community it is a fortune.

[PeeWeeMadman]

8. Not only in AMerica

Actually, richer kids do that in Norway too, it is a global trend.

Had to laugh at an interview with a norwegian rapper: "Have to succed in music or I will............. ahem......... Take a decent job with a decent wage........".

Hip hop in a welfare state just isn`t the same, is it?

[Sugarbleus]

9. Hi UGP, Excellent, Excellent, Excellent rant!!!

As usual..

Someone made the remark pointing out that this trend to be rich or kill yourself (paraphrased by me), didn't just begin with Bush..I agree whole heartedly (though under his watch this "achievement sickness" that grips our society has floated to the top..rapidly).

The charge to achieve achieve achieve, gather in gather in gather in, every man for himself, has been percolating for decades. It was like that at the begninning of this nation by a specialized class and now it's back, irreguardless of the advances liberals or thoughtful repubs made, over intervening years, for human rights, life with dignity, and equal opportunity. Sadly, today, too many "liberals" have contracted that achievement disease as well. :puke:

WE ARE GOING BACKWARDS........ Like a treadmill out of control.

Good to "see" you... SB

[mdmc]

10. rant on!

[indigo32]

11. It is really sad to see

how obsessed we are with materialism. We've sold our soul for the illusion of prosperity in our nation. Too few even have that, those not lucky enough to receive it are disposable, here and abroad. The fundimentalist Christians speak of our lack of sexual morals and harken back to the fall of Rome. I think they'd be better off focusing on other morals.

[Cobalt Violet]

12. But I just have to have those $325.00 distressed jeans.

:sarcasm: