(6/22/05) - Honestly, I normally just erase all those annoying emails. There must've been at least a dozen newspapers I "registered" with via the internet in order to get more than two sentences of an article while finishing my Master's.

But now I'm back interning for free after a few hundred applications and now applying to work part-time as a tow truck, a delivery driver, a projectionist and as a grunt at a copy shop. And my pissing and moaning isn't alone in the bitter woods of would-be do-gooders who screamed at the zombie walking, baby boomer drones in the burbs that knew the American dream is true and if we just stay in school, shut the hell up and follow the plan we'll be "successful".

Moored with the perpetual student loans friends drudge through working two or three jobs as caterers, waiters, swimming pool and gas station attendants while those degrees collect dust on the walls of our parents who got fired at the age of 51 and still attend churches with gentle souls who come into our shitholes of underemployment to spit on us and rebute to our state of affairs, "Well, you just didn't apply yourself!"

Aside from this running through my head perpetually urging me to offer older customers with said lovely attitude my balls dipped in their sodas, it caused me to notice an article from the New York Times frequent emails: An Op-Ed piece entitled, "Losing Our Country".

Okay. Not a bad read even though I heard this on NPR quite a while back about how the American Dream of the baby boomers was a bubble that's burst. It is the end bit of empty optimism that lit a fire under my ass.

"Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won't be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let's try to do something about the politics of greed."

Is this guy serious? Perhaps he's required to end a piece this way with some sort of optimism. Maybe he's not allowed to write, "Everything is fucked. The elites will continue to take more and more from the majority of Americans and don't care one iota about your life or the ideals that theoretically stand behind empty terms like freedom, liberals, or family which are used to distract and divide the public. The 1%ers suckle our culture war like their own piglets and only direct, drastic measures to endanger their comfort, their families and their positions of power will allow for proper ability to negotiate this class-war."

Okay. A mainstream paper most likely can't write something that kick ass. But that's the catch here. That's the bit stuck in my craw. "Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity...emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war." And the distraction tactics to keep Americans divided over stupid topics like stem cell research obviously are working? And here's a lavishly employed writer for the NY Times who makes a polite request to the middle-class to do something about the present reality that they don't weild such great economic power or influence anymore, while the most elite have gobbled up more and more since the 1970s? Dude! I'm sure they'll hop right to it as soon as this episode of Friends is over. Why not tell Chad and Haiti to stop being dirt poor while you're on a roll?
-T$