Comment

Breaking: Neo-Nazi Sympathizing "Celebrity" Tila Tequila Suspended From Twitter

63
Anymouse 🌹🏡😷11/22/2016 5:18:26 am PST

re: #61 HappyWarrior

In the end, while my working class maternal grandparents certainly did have to work hard and make no mistake they did, my grandparents weren’t fleeing their home because of bans on interracial marriage as my grandfather’s famous employee Richard Loving did. My grandfather as a heterosexual man did not have to worry about losing his job to his sexual orientation the way LGBT people do today. And as a U.S born white man, unlike Hispanics of today, he never really had to worry about people accusing him of taking their jobs. Being working class isn’t easy. I won’t say Sanders is wrong on that point and we should be in favor of things like living wages, more affordable college education of some kind, etc but where Sanders is wrong is that the marginized groups are engaging in identity politics. They have been told repeatedly that they are the other. Black men and women, poor and wealthy have experienced harassment by the police. Same thing with LGBT people who don’t have discrimination protections. Sanders needs to get this. If he doesn’t. It will be hard to take him seriously.

My maternal grandparents certainly were working class, as were my great-grandparents on their side. (Grandmother a nurse, a shopkeeper, and a schoolteacher in that order, grandfather an engineer for Ford and then a steelworker in Flint.) Great-grandparents were farmers.

My paternal grandparents fled the Nazis from Danzig, and were also working class in Massachusetts (my grandmother a homemaker along with her mother, my grandfather working for Uniroyal).

All my grandparents entered WW2 to fight against the Nazis and fascists; my paternal grandfather did not come home.

My parents were the first to go to college in my family (my mother in clinical psychology and my father in agricultural science). Since they were both in the US Navy, that qualifies in my mind as “working class” as well.

No college for me though. My sister went partly through veterinary school before the money ran out. We also were in the military, which to my mind qualifies as “working class” as well.

And yet, I can understand “identity politics,” as all politics boils down to that. As a male, I vote for candidates who support women’s issues, as I can identify with the women in my family. I vote for candidates that want to improve education, because I can relate to others with children (and the need for an educated populace to compete in the world). I can identify with minority equal rights, because if you can strip the rights from one group (or deny them), then you can strip the rights from any group.