John_Dee
Active Member
One would certainly hope so. It's a pretty tall order, though, and is definitely easier said than done. All the usual self-serving (and self-deluding) reasons come into play here as to why people at the lower end of the economic spectrum insist on cutting their own throats by supporting the likes of Rob Ford: Ego, ideology, fear, anger, pride, resentment, the pathetic need to feel better about one's own miserable lot in life by having smaller, weaker targets to beat up on. And all wrapped up in a neat little box called tribalism. There are people out there who'd be perfectly content to live under an overpass, roasting pigeons over fires to survive as long as fellow sufferers beneath neighboring overpasses don't even get the pigeons.
Or perhaps they wouldn't be content, exactly...But it would just be one more thing to blame on whatever hated scapegoats happen to be handy. The people sporting this mindset sure as hell aren't going to chalk up any misfortunes to their own stupid, selfish, short-sighted decisions. "I wanna vote fer a Pres'dent/Gov'nor/Mayor that I can have a beer with! What th-? I've been laid off 'cause my business moved overseas? Ain't no more U.I and I don't qualify fer Welfare? Whaddahya mean my health care's been cancelled?!?"
In "From Hell" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell - and here I'm talking about the excellent book, and not the utterly shitty movie adaptation - there's an early scene in which two characters are having a long, meandering discussion that covers several different subjects. At one point, the topic turns to politics, and one of the men, who fancies himself an intellectual, spouts some standard leftist boilerplate. His companion, who's a retired police detective, replies something along these lines: "That's where you're wrong. The working class aren't interested in universal justice. They don't want your glorious revolution. They just want more money." I know it's a work of fiction, but that latter point is something I've seen at work myself, with total strangers as well as members of my own immediate family.
