May 13, 2015

Dumbing Down the Trickle Down

We spend less on education across the decades. And create a spiral of social decay with each generation.

Australia watches another generation enter our society ill-equipped to cope with the power of marketing, spin and bullshit media. They grow up thinking "A Current Affair" is a source of news and information. They grow believing "subway" is health food. They grow up fearing foreigners and their wives. That generation is the new vulnerable.

They are easily impacted by the street trade of drugs. They have no idea what home ownership looks like. They have no skills to critically assess honesty in media or politics. They are financially caged, cash-flow poor and unable to make decisions without checking the cash in their wallet first.

The men with money talk about those families below the poverty line as though they are a disease, a self-inflicted wound that needs to be purged for fear it may infect an otherwise healthy body. The men with money rely on these walking wounds to feed their profits, to buy their Coke, to drive their trucks, to vote for the LNP.

The men with money are blind to humanity, to people, they are the biggest sociopaths Australia has ever known. The men with money increase funding for police to fight the war on drugs, and cut the funding for education to deliver an even more vulnerable generation just around the corner. The men with money concoct elaborate justifications for diverting government spending to subsidise the activities of the rich and greedy.

Hi Gina, how are you today and how much diesel fuel did you buy with our money this week Governments are strangely reluctant to fund safe houses for victims of domestic violence.

More women die each year from being bashed to death by their partners than terrorist attacks, but where does the money go? Men with money understand the fear of terrorism, because terrorists can harm their stock portfolio or ruin plans for a holiday in Bali. Men with money do not understand the terror of living with violence, living in a home where nothing is certain for a single day.

Beer and gambling are what fuels domestic violence in Australia. Snorting cocaine never managed to achieve a socially acceptable status, but getting blind drunk is woven into the fabric of our culture. Across every socio-economic level their is glamour in grog. It's the most damaging drug of our times. It shortens lives, kills prematurely, ruins careers and sends families broke. It's a great source of revenue for tax coffers however.

The biggest tax based social cancer we have is gambling however. State revenues are addicted to gambling money, so much so that we watch our suburbs slowly drain their home equity into the casinos, pokies, horses and footy. The men with money realise that "gambling" is a dirty word, so they call it "gaming" instead to make it sound less of a big deal. Play a game, have a flutter, put two-bob each way.

What's the harm? After all the beer drinking under educated have nothing better to do with their lives and it's fun to slowly spiral into bankruptcy and force your family onto the streets.

The only thing more disgusting than watching our politicians shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic is watching media whores like Alan Jones profit from the charade.

The man who made millions off his fake fondness for the families on "struggle street" is the first to slip in the boot when a documentary goes to air revealing a few home truths about those in Western Sydney who cannot afford a chauffeur driven Merc. In true form Alan delivers a tirade of condemnation about the TV series while admitting that he hans't actually watched it.

Alan is of course one of the men with money. He has bags of it. He's not ashamed because he would argue that he worked so hard for it. Did he work 1 million times harder than anyone in Mount Druit? At the heart of this "I worked hard for my bags of money" argument is the idea that somehow others didn't work hard for their low rent housing. The suggestion is that somehow it's their fault for being poor.

Gina is helpful in this regard of course, she loves to remind the working poor that if you want more money just work harder. That advice seems a little hollow from someone who was left millions of dollars by her father.

Education is always the key to poverty. Money is not the key, but it does slow things down. It's hard work starting at the bottom of the pile and working your way up, but the better the education the more likely you are to make progress. Take away that education and you condemn a generation to failure before they had a chance.

No man is poorer than a man without an education. No nation is poorer than a nation divided.

The men with money are blind to the poor, to the humanity of poverty. The gap between "have and have not" widens. The fabric of society wears more thin and frail. It's a slippery slope as we watch the vulnerable become increasingly desperate and the government increasingly lost.

Is this the inevitable decay of democratic society? Wealth attained through social contract, for the benefit of all, leads to super wealth for some and pushed others into poverty until we're back at feudal chaos?

If you let gambling, alcohol and violence destroy lives across the country what kind of future does our society hold? How does the next generation of poorly educated citizens expect to improve the picture? Where did all the money go from the mining boom, because the country is broke and our governments are broken.