If you aren’t bitter, you aren’t paying attention
“It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” - Obama
There are parts of Pennsylvania that use to be filled with real, solid jobs. We’re talking jobs where people used their muscle, brains and guts to take something fairly worthless and turn it into a source of prosperity. The people who did these jobs took pride in their work and felt that they were contributing to the security and prosperity not just of their families but of their nation.
Suddenly, however, the global economy hit and these jobs simply vanished. Families with two or three generations in the same industry were left without livelihoods. So, these people turned to their government for guidance and help.
Every election cycle, the politicians come by and promise things. “Better days will come when you vote for me,” both parties say. And people have tried. Both parties. And then when the election is over, they’ve watched as the politicians have done everything you can imagine except restore jobs with dignity to the region.
For 25 years, people in Pennsylvania have struggled through some of the worst regional economic situations in the nation and they have done it, basically, alone.
If these people aren’t bitter, then they aren’t paying attention.
They have, in frustration, tried to understand how this happened to them and some of them have decided that it is the fault of immigrants — forgetting that most of their families came into these industries as immigrants. Realizing that neither party is actually doing anything in order to help, they become careless of their own interests. Abortion, gay rights, gun ownership are issues that are simple to understand and where you can actually see if a politician is keeping his/her word. And so they try to vote based on these issues, often betraying their own economic best interests.
They hold onto the certain and the simple because life has become so damn uncertain and complicated that it seems to have left ordinary people behind.
If these people aren’t bitter, then they are stupid.
Their children will be, perhaps, the first generation to be worse off (financially and educationally) than their parents. This feels like a crushing failure and it makes people reevaluate their entire belief system. The country they love seems to have forgotten about them — someone must be at fault. It’s so easy to blame people who don’t look or talk like you. To say that these ‘others’ have destroyed what once made this nation great and to let that sense of failure become a burning hate.
If these people aren’t bitter, then they don’t love their children.
What Obama said wasn’t patronizing or elitist. It was nothing more than the truth. A hard truth, spoken by a man who has been at both ends of this pattern, I suspect. As a boy, he saw the poverty and heard the kind of thinking it produced. As a man, he has probably been at the striking end of the hatred it can produce. If Obama made a mistake in his syntax, as he said, it was mainly in assuming his audience would fill in the rest of the argument for him. He “shorthanded” his thinking and that became for the Clinton camp, not a “teachable moment” but an exploitable one.
If the electorate isn’t bitter, it’s only because they aren’t paying attention.
Your turn to snark!
