People: we get the government we deserve

What's happening to us? Why is there a feeling of crisis in the culture? Two crucial reads, maybe the most important things I have read in a while (next Picketty's tome on capitalism): one, in this issue of THE NEW YORKER, is on the hunger games capitalism crushing all of us and how income disparity is a choice. It explains a lot of current thinking on the topic, but points a finger at why the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class is being erased, and it comes down to a kind of wholesale moral theft by our leadership:    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/richer-and-poorer

The second read connects to the first in that it exposes one racist, classist way we raise public revenues: creating and maintaining a permanent underclass, that is not exclusively but is deeply racist and is another kind of wholesale theft.  The just released report on Ferguson is explained in this issue of THE ATLANTIC. It exonerates the officer but lays the blame where it belongs, exposing one dangerous facet of our growing police state. And it's us. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/The-Gangsters-Of-Ferguson/386893/ 

In between these two articles, we can't ignore that we have militarized our police not to keep the public welfare, but to raid the poorest and/or most marginalized among us, and we've put into place the systems above that have and are chipping away at social systems that support all of us. Above and below, we have given away community. WE gave it away, and now the middle class is caught as if in a vise, and are we screaming? Trying to change things? No, we point fingers--color, religion, class, race, profession, you name it--and it's somebody else's fault that the standard of living is decreasing for most of us, while the uber rich, the trans-national rich increasingly hoard more and more. And we all sit back and complain while secretly aspiring to a wealth we will never see.  All of us pointing fingers this way or that. It's our government, people. It's manifests what WE value. And that means US.  If you are not outraged, you are either not awake or you are deluded--precisely what our current K-12 system tries to ensure. 

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