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Whining Home Owners,
Their Class Privilege, Senator Obama said that we should all share the blame for the economic crisis as we were all living beyond our means. Um, EXCUSE ME?! I was never*allowed* to live beyond my means. So back up there, Mr. Class Privilege. I have never been allowed a line of credit this lifetime. Thus I have spent my life as a renter, driving used cars. I wear thrift store clothing and I live within my means. That has always been less than what I actually need for survival with human dignity. The government is protecting land owners once again. Oh, poor home owners. Boo hoo, you may lose your house. Call me when it is actually serious: i.e., you are being kicked out of your APARTMENT! If anyone needs housing cost breaks, it is the RENTERS, not the home owners “living beyond their means.” Let RENTERS not pay rent for three months like home owners, that would be a start. We renters pay those land owners’ mortgages, plus a profit to them, while working for their companies at minimum wages. We get fucked coming and going. I am all for evening the playing field here and denying credit to everyone. I want to see how others manage without credit, as I have. Only being able to use the exact amount of money you have in hand. I would like to see the types of cars people drive when they have to pay for them up front as I have been forced to. I want to see them start up businesses with only cash on hand as I have been forced to do. I want to see how many can buy their houses all cash up front, as has been demanded of me for home ownership. I want to see how other people pay their rents while working jobs that do not pay enough for rent rates, while not being allowed credit. When the pampered middle class arrives in the survival landscape I have lived in my whole life, they scream out saying it is unbearable and unfair. They are victims of foul play. Someone needs to bail them out, via bankruptcy or government bailouts. Funny, no one cares or listens when poor people scream those same complaints. And when poor people get a minimal amount of economic assistance compared to these huge proposed middle class bail outs, it is with great stigma and shaming. The middle class are immune to this shaming when they want help. No one is forcing home owners getting bailouts to go to the WorkFirst Office like poor people have to do to get other forms of welfare. I am really pissed off right now. When people with a ton of money, equity and property have housing woes, all of a sudden it is a “crisis.” Living in a house is a luxury, not a right-- having your own walls and yard, a garden, storage, all that room, redecorating as you want, etc. If you are having money problems, sell your assets and come down to our level: the renters’ level. If you cannot pay your mortgage, you need to either sell and then rent or you need to rent to someone while you move to a smaller rental. But home owners like their spacious houses and feel they deserve them. So, they do not object to taking government welfare to keep their housing. Yet they snub people in government housing projects or people who fight for rent control. Well, maybe rightly so. They got the government to pay for their private houses, not some slummed out crappy housing project. Who’s the dumb one there? We renters are forced to kiss land owner ass we never would kiss naturally. It makes me sick and indignant that I am being forced into this constant servitude and second class citizenship. And it is due to the class fault line of home ownership, or even more generally, land ownership. I want to know why we, those paying the highest prices in this society as low paid workers and high rent payers, are not being bailed out FIRST?! Tonight I am so sick of land owners and their whining and sniveling when they do not even know what true economic suffering on a survival level and homelessness is. I am about to blow! I hope all these privileged people come down to my level. Let them know how it feels to pay rent endlessly to landlords so their daughters can get botox, fake breasts and French manicures on their toes. The poor hand hard earned money over to landlords who then let their privileged little children wipe their butts with our rent money. And then we have to listen to these privileged snot nosed people complain about their “poverty”. If you are a land owner, and you have the audacity to complain to a renter about your money problems, know that we are entertaining your delusions momentarily, but inside, we think you are hideous and pathetic. I remember reading diaries of privileged white women from plantation ownership families during the Civil War. These women described themselves as previously rich, living abundantly due to slave labor. And now they were begging for sympathy in rags, sobbing, pilfering the ground for any stray bullet metal to trade for food. The sorrowful accounts of these privileged women are good records of how the privileged *can* fall and be reduced to picking through dirt for food money. Do you think her slaves, now freed, harbored even one drop of sympathy for her being reduced to those rags? I bet instead, they felt it a relief to see that perhaps there is some fairness in the world. A class insulated princess said to me tonight that “renting is a choice.” HELLO? In what world is this woman living?! Many of us in the lower income sectors have been in an “economic crisis” for decades. This is nothing new. What is new is the pampered little middle class babies are now hurting, so NOW there is a crisis. Apparently the only time economics matter is when the have’s do not get what they want. The have not’s have been suffering at a more desperate level than anyone in this current economic crunch and it was never labeled urgent. And the class chasm grows… I would like to see a more even playing field where there is no inherited wealth. Where we all start with the same provisions and assets and it is up to us how we use them. Renting is a choice my ass. Not when a privileged class have stolen all the lands and are now selling the land back to a lower class at a gross profit, keeping them in poverty, resisting all land reform and rent control. The middle class in America do not know what suffering is. The bottom line is, if your issues are not food and paying rent, not *your* mortgage, but someone else’s mortgage, aka rent, then save your breath. The poor are not sympathetic to the pampered middle class with their houses. Recently, several of these insulated idiots have complained to me that their houses were mere burdens, that their land was worthless and a mere cost to them now. My standard response is that if they want to sign ownership over to me right now, I will take those “burdens” off their hands. There is a chasm growing between the middle and lower classes that is causing the lower classes to seriously resent the middle class whining over things we in the lower class were told to just accept without remedy for decades, if not centuries. My sympathies and allegiances remain with the low income renting class, who should be bailed out long before land owners. My mother used to say during the civil rights movement that the poor are those who really have the power if they would use it. The poor are the ones society should fear as they have the anger and motivation to force revolution through with immediacy. Nothing has changed regarding the class chasm, but its growth, in my lifetime in the United States. I look forward to the day that someone who has actually EXPERIENCED real poverty and homelessness first hand CAN run for president of the United States. We are far from there right now. And it is only the middle class needs that are met with any urgency when poor people are freezing to death on the streets in tattered rags a block away and the middle class have the NERVE to demand their needs be met first? It is outrageous. Regarding the current “economic crisis” - get in line, and welcome to my world. We were in line for help first and for a longer time, and under worse conditions. And the middle class expect our sympathy?! Oh please. Save the bullshit. We are poor, not dumb. Kirsten
Anderberg | |
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Fall
2008