A Baltimore resident (R) speaks to a protester. April 27,2015
So that the billionaires can feel more secure than they already are, we tax the poor at a higher rate. We remove all safety nets that might help the poor. We make it harder and harder to make ends meet for the poor and easier and easier for the wealthy.
We cut and cut and cut funding for education removing even that remote possibility as a source of hope against the desperate poverty people face. And then the wealthy complain that there are no longer any workers available with education enough to fill their positions. Well, Mr. Billionaire, we cut your taxes and paid for it with money we needed for education for the 99% making your complaint sound a wee bit hollow.
We ship millions and millions of decent jobs out of the country so that the billionaires can make even more money than they already have. Leaving no decent jobs for Americans. With no way out of this cycle of poverty and despair created by the wealthy elite at the cost of everyone else's security, these geniuses wonder why everyone is not as happy as they are with it. Why on Earth would they riot?
The blatantly unfair, unjust, systemic inequality has now been firmly institutionalized in our economic system. The resulting relentless despair of the impoverished just doesn't make sense to the wealthy who have no experience with any such a thing as hopelessness, so they desperately look for ways to blame the victims.
You try working three jobs while knowing that even all that effort and hard work is not going to be enough to feed your family and see how upbeat and positive you remain. Or you try living with the constant worry that you are unable to protect your own children from the vagaries of a random police murder happening to them on the street and then tell me how easy it is to immediately submit to any order that a cop might shout at you for any reason at all.
No wonder Freddie Gray instinctively runs away when he sees the police. That just makes sense if you consider that for him and millions of other black or let's be frank, any less affluent member of society, there is just not any upside to an interaction with police. The best case scenario is that they only detain you and take from you your time. The worst case is, well, they murder you and then blame you for your own murder. That is a large array of possibilities, none of which seem very good to me.
We remove all hope for ever escaping the tragic cycle of poverty that rich people have created and then blame the victims of this greedy upper class as if it were all their fault. We portray the victims of this enslavement as the force behind the tragic and brutally unfair, unjust system. To the wealthy, the poor simply cannot be made to suffer enough.
People have protested in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and are continuing to protest today. They are told that peaceful protest is the only way instigate change.
And you ask why, after more than four decades of the same old excuses and lies told by the establishment with only worsening and further impoverishment showing up in reality, why would people begin to lose hope in peaceful protest and riot instead? You must be really really flagrantly ignorant to ask that question. What have they got to lose that our society has not already taken from them?
They are already under the constant threat of murder by the police all the time, every day - whether they have committed a crime or are perfect saints.
They are already shackled to a cycle of poverty without any real hope of escape for themselves or their children. Those who imagine that the American Dream is still possible are hopelessly blind, willfully ignorant to the facts of today. And there are still a far too large number of these well segregated and informationally challenged individuals.
Despite the shrieking protests of these info-bubble Pollyannas, there has not been anything like upward mobility in this country for more than four decades. Instead, we are barreling along down the uneven slope into even more egregious inequality. How bad does it have to get before we move to cauterize the wounds? We are close to utter disaster now, and unless we make drastic changes, beginning with a massive transfer of wealth from the top, back down into the hands of the impoverished, we will soon be in a country where less than 1% own everything there is to own, and everyone else will be required to serve them or die. Deny this truth at your own, and everyone else's peril.
The American Dream is long dead. Or as the late, great George Carlin used to say, "They call it the American Dream because you would have to be asleep and dreaming to believe it."
Shame. Shame on the wealthy elite, and those who are pandering to them in our political ranks, always grasping to pay less than those who daily struggle to feed their families on less and less resources. Fighting tooth and nail in an already unbalanced, sick system of clearly inescapable injustice. And you ask why people riot? I am astonished that they do not do more than that in this blatantly unjust blatantly unfair system of robber barons constantly beating the very life out of them and their families for generation after generation.
People have been protesting this kind of blatant economic inequality since before Jesus Christ correctly named it a lousy idea, in itself preventing entrance to Heaven. And the wealthy elite never seem to quite get the message of just how much everyone hates it.
But it seems peaceful protests have gotten them nothing other than, as the old coal miner song says, "another day older and deeper in debt." How many more decades of this gross injustice would a reasonable person ask before a change of tactics was warranted?
Sadly, even now, with people literally dying over this cause, it will make no real difference until those who control/own everything decide that it will benefit themselves to allow the changes we need to happen. They have successfully bought our country, the politicians work for them just like the CEO works for the shareholders, and the rest of us will continue to suffer and struggle and die until they see that perhaps it would be better to allow the other 99.9% of humans to also be able to survive along with them.
Why do "they" riot? "They" would like to be free. Free to pursue, oh I don't know, how about life, liberty and happiness? Perhaps "they" are beginning to see just how far away that possibility is from becoming even remotely possible for "them."