Writing for the New York Times on Tuesday, January 23, 2012, Thomas L. Friedman cautioned Russian leadership:
Humiliation is the single most underestimated force in politics. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you force people to live indefinitely inside a rigged game that is flaunted in their face or make them feel like cattle that can be passed by one leader to his son or one politician to another, eventually they’ll explode. These are the emotions that sparked the uprisings in Cairo and Moscow…
I can't be the only reader struck deeply by the irony of Friedman's words. Russia? He was writing about the United States of America!
That's what the Occupy Movement was about. That's what the Tea Party is about. It's about humiliation. It's about the existence of special classes of people in America who get to live by different rules, who have to obey fewer laws, who do not have to face consequences for their actions.
Friedman writes: "…nothing spurred the protests (in Russia) more than the daily experience of Muscovites having to sit in traffic while a car with a flashing blue light carrying some Putin crony behind tinted glass speeds past. 'It is all about dignity,' said (Aleksei) Navalny. 'Who are these people? Why don’t they care about our rights? It doesn’t matter at all how good a career you build. You will stand in this traffic, and these people and their sons will drive past you with their blue lights.' ”
Who are these people in America who get to profit from manipulating our mortgages, get bailed out with our tax dollars and take a small bit of their huge bonuses to buy a Mercedes that cost more than the houses repossessed by my local bank?
Who are these people who lie to Congress while flaunting the so-called free market with monopolies on medications or cell phones, who corrupt congressman from Oregon, who write obscure state laws taking away the rights of the average man and spend millions of their obscene wealth buying state legislators to pass them?
The Koch brothers want us to breathe the foul pollution of their profit and go without health care when it starts to kill us. Goldman Sachs wants the keys to our bank and for us to admire them when they run off with our money. Rupert Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal want us to consume the crap they charade as news so we will be unable to vote as the informed citizens idealized by Thomas Jefferson.
Murdoch has broken privacy laws and he is free. Executives at Goldman lied to Congress and they are free. The Koch brothers should be jailed for crimes against democracy, and they are free!
It's humiliating. The privileged of America have their laws and impose a different set on us. The "Bush Dynasty." The very concept is nauseating. Since when did America succumb to adulation of royalty? I don't care if it is a Bush or a Kennedy: when did the name grow to mean more than accomplishment?
The right wing has successfully portrayed poor black Americans, Latinos and illegal immigrants as special classes who don't have to live by the rules. Those who believe these groups are privileged need to trade places with someone living in the ghetto or barrio whose children live a far harsher life than many can even imagine.
The left wing has fumbled the ball every time they point at the "one percent" and then get hit with the charge of "class warfare." Get over it, Liberals. Yes, it may be class warfare, but it wasn't the lower classes who started it. It was bankers flouting a system they own to rake in hundreds of millions while many of us can't afford to see a doctor.
The poor white guy driving a pick-up with a gun rack to one unemployment line after another is as tired of the humiliation as the poor black mother unable to buy a car to get to a job. They are on the same side. The wrong side. The humiliation side.
My pet phrase has been that unless you give people opportunity, they will take it with either a ballot or a bullet. Clever, but inadequate. Friedman puts his finger on it exactly. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in politics.
It's long past time to bring that message home.
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2 comments:
Humiliation is indeed a potent, explosive and dangerous force. It produces rage in both men and nations. People forget pain, but the sting of humiliation never recedes, especially when it cuts at fundamental "identity."
Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis is imperfect, but I think he's correct in identifying what I would define as a sense of humiliation providing a rich seedbed for conflict between Islam and the West:
"The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US department of Defence. It is the West, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West."
A sense of humiliation imposed by the Versailles Treaty after the First World War made Germans receptive to the toxic message of Adolf Hitler.
Oops, sorry, meant to sing that previous comment
Jim Cornelius
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