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teamramonycajal  ·  3849 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Soapbox Sundays S01E02: Expound on an Idea/Philosophy of Yours

I'd like to tell you a story about two siblings from a working-class family.

One was an older female. She hated where she lived, saw nothing for her, and got out. She was law-abiding, conscientious, a good student, and she went to college, got her bachelor's degree, worked three jobs every summer to pay for it, and then got a master's degree. She got married at 36 and had a (planned) kid.

One was a younger male. He didn't apply himself, barely got through high school, never had an honest job in his life, sold pot, had dealings with the local Mafia, got married at 19, and made money off of suing people for petty accidents and falsely claiming injury.

The older female is my mother. The younger male I do not consider family at all and is currently all over the place with an opiate addiction and calls my mother about three times a day, every day, and is despondent about his life and his decisions. His son, who is as stupid as he is and has $20,000 dollars in debt for going to a fucking mechanic school instead of maybe having near zero student loans for going to community college and getting a real, four-year bachelor's degree and actually getting educated, has started physically abusing him. His wife, who is also as much of a stupid, uneducated fool as he is, can't fucking figure out how opiate addiction works and thinks it doesn't have a physiological component to it.

The moral of this story, I guess, is that I get really pissed off when I hear other upper-middle-class, college-educated left-wingers like myself talk about the working class like they aren't participants in making their lives shitty and like they're Blameless Angelic Martyrs for the Evil Elites, and the solution is to make education and mental health care accessible to everybody. I think people who oppose nationalized healthcare and universal access to higher education are goddamned short-sighted, egocentric scum.

EDIT: And someone on here will unleash holy hell on me for supposedly being a classist, but at some point opposition to classism turned into the non-racist equivalent of the Noble Savage trope.