As the old joke goes, “the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Or another variant: “America will never forgive blacks for slavery.” Oppressors and abusers (and the beneficiaries of past abuses) often project their own guilt, self-loathing and dehumanization onto their victims, then hate them for being evidence – the living (or dead) proof – of the abusers’ moral rot. So it is with the rich and the poor, as a new story at Alternet demonstrates.
Tana Ganeva’s story focuses mainly on a Facebook page, “Third and 33rd (and Beyond),” put up by “residents of Murray Hill and Kips Bay, predominantly wealthy neighborhoods on the east side of midtown Manhattan, where buildings have doormen and British-sounding names like the Wilshire, the Sycamore and Windsor Court.” These wealthy denizens seem to spend an inordinate amount of their incalculably valuable time prowling their neighborhoods looking for homeless people upon which to pour their digital vitriol. And, of course, bashing Mayor Bill de Blasio for actively encouraging such “dangerous scum” to pollute their classy surroundings and drive the city as a whole straight into the gutter.
I won’t excerpt the story here, but do give it a read. Especially the part where Ganeva goes in search of the “scum” being shamed not only by UCTs (Upper Class Twits) on social media but also by big-time blunderbusses like Fox News and the NY Post, and, shockingly, finds a collection of actual human beings instead.
The story is good, but unfortunately there is nothing new about the theme. Every time a Democrat is elected mayor of NYC, the city suddenly becomes a hellhole of crime and filth where the lower orders are turned loose by hateful liberals, who shackle the noble NYPD whenever it tries to impose order and protect the propertied. And every time a Republican is elected, NY is suddenly transformed into a sleek, clean, efficient city where people know their place and cheerful cops keep the “bad people” in line. It doesn’t matter what the actual statistics are, what the actual realities might be: the same perceptual dynamic plays out over and over.
Then again, it’s ALWAYS been this way in NYC, pre-dating today’s Dem-Rep split. The wealthy NY elite and their servitors in the press and the business world have always railed about the “degeneration” of the city at the hands of one grubby, grasping minority or another. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Hispanics – and of course, the African-Americans, who have been the eternal scapegoat of NYC’s ruling class since the days when those elites were buying and selling black people in the slave market on Wall Street – all have had their turn in the pillory.
But this story is a nice encapsulation of what our modern elites are thinking, and how much so many of them utterly despise all those who have been damaged, lost, hobbled or destroyed by our unjust and inhumane system – or by personal tragedy, psychic demons and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Their pitilessness is breathtaking; and sick-making.