YSSUP (Wise Up)

The point is that soccer was bequeathed originally to the working class and rugby was the sport of the elite, so in a way soccer remains one of my connections with the working class.  Now the middle class are the one's that can afford the tickets to soccer games, yesteryears no seat stadiums have become today's all-seater stadiums, and the football clubs themselves are a cool elitist symbol.  The Chinese Super League wants to pay some of the top players huge amounts of money because the burgeoning middle class there has plenty of disposable doe.

In 2008 the US economy nearly came crashing down and that was a warning shot about the precarious financial leverage in the States, the question that keeps going through my mind is whether living in the West is the best place, when the chief reason I find it difficult to relate to the middle class here is that it is generally more predictable.  The one thing I know is that the middle class populations of India and China are young and developing, but I have no inkling whether this makes them any different in groupthink in comparison to the West. 

Douglas Adams had a hoot poking fun at the middle class in his depiction of the B'Ark - the useless third from the Planet Golgafrincham, placed on an ark that is programmed to crash.

The BBC turned Douglas Adams depiction of the middle class into 11 great minutes of comic hilarity.  It is the kind of humour that accompanies a baseline of trivial reality and a pandora's box of lives that should be opened up with care, lest we are overwhelmed by the stories they contain, even if it is the middle class that can afford middle class shrinks.

At least the poor don't have to worry about a mass of consumption, because they are used to paying for the cheapest stuff given to them, no fuss, no big decision, just buy and swallow.  The elites have extravagant rituals that one needs a social PhD to discern, but it does it job to keep the riff-raff out and the old money flowing one rich generation to the next.  Even in the world of employment it is actually fun working with working class employees.  Not so with middle class employees who have the whole 9 to 5 racket worked out - whiningly complain so to keep HR on their toes to instigate employee engagement programs, when they are already a spoilt bunch.

It is the middle class that have utterly useless intellectual battles with each other or the instigators of office politics, which are dog-eat-dog fights which then translate into work projects and actions that the minions carry out and sacrifice to make work, while their middle class managers vie for a seat at the table, or some equally empty power struggle of many aspiring wannabees looking for those few coveted spots in the highest ranks of leadership.

Working with the top executive team of a major corporation is an easier proposition than sinking one's flesh into the teeth of the white collar layers.  Working with blue collar people is at least a humbling experience when communication is reduced to Grade 6 level and as we attempt to talk to working people in patronizing communication, until that is a consultant is employed and actually listens to the grassroots and then transform what they hear back into the language of the middle class. Back when I was doing this with my partner, we did not look like the Two Bobs, but that tempts to get back into this game because as each year passes I am getting closer to looking like the bald Bob.  I did not take a time out from that kind of work, I took a Usain Bolt run away from it.

How do I wise up from this over-generalized view of the world, when the chief capability and facility within the middle class is to have so much of this over-generalized take on the world.  In some ways it is reassuring that the elites have the largest stash of moolah, because no matter how much the middle class talk about moving the working class out of poverty, that poverty will continue to exist.  I know that because I have seen it first hand with native groups, where the money marked for reservations is more or less consumed well before it has any effect on advancing the condition at the grassroots.  As the condition worsens, their middle class caretakers demand more money to solve increasing social issues - it is daft, so now that money is trickle-up economics, this makes the middle class think more, even if they have far less now.

When in Rome do as the Romans do, but there was a fall of Rome no matter how much anyone did in Rome that was like the Romans.  There is a bright side to what would otherwise be a depressing reality, it is when we come to terms that the way the middle class life is structured, it is and will always be BS.  It is built of the mythological - dreams of making it big to join the elites and none of the dirt reality that working class folk face day in day out.  The Middle Class existence in the West can be defined somewhere below the song Imagine and above the song Working Class Hero - it is a great place to be, neither being up or being down - just no where.  When I embrace this depressing reality of the middle class life - I am no longer depressed by it, because I am nearly one step closer to the only freedom found here, which is 100% in the BS.