Being middle-class in the US these days is like experiencing a shipwreck at ultra-slow stop-motion speed. Each day, you can see the floor tilt a little more. Hull panels start to protrude, then water trickles in at the glacier-like pace of one centimeter per day. Week after week, the floor buckles, the walls hang awry. Every month, another lower compartment is gone.
Eric Auld has this cautionary tale of how bad things are. Note especially the comments at the end of the piece, and the smug, self-satisfied cretins who throw garbage at graduate school and higher education. They are neoliberalism's homegrown "shabiya" -- the ideological equivalent of the "ghost brigades", a.k.a. rented thugs of Syria's murderous and dying dictatorship.
When the ship of empire sinks, the rats bare their teeth.
This is not a counsel of despair -- the decent folk vastly outnumber the shabiya, both in Syria and here.
But their existence is a warning that we must not become like them. We must remember that every day is a fight to retain a scrap of dignity. A fight to live less desperately and hopelessly. A fight to not become just another monster of the total system.
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