Where Is The Uprising?

March 30, 2009 / 1:27 pm • By Dr. Melissa Clouthier

This weekend, Sudhir Venkatesh editorializing in the New York Times wondered where the uprising is:

Before blogs and radio call-in shows, people joined forces and turned to the streets as their most effective means of expression; a unified, angry crowd was often sufficient to win concessions from employers and governments. And so most rebellions of the 20th century were over bread-and-butter issues like unsafe work conditions, wages and high prices for basic commodities. Even “race riots” were usually motivated by competition between ethnic groups over access to jobs and housing subsidies.

But some outbreaks of lawlessness were also indicators of strong, shared sentiments and were driven by a sense of higher purpose. For example, in 1919 Chicago, black soldiers returned home from World War I to find segregated ghettos, white-dominated unions and racist government practices. Many joined their neighbors who battled white youth and police officers in the streets. They had fought an enemy overseas; now it was their moral duty to fight injustice at home.

Ah, the good old days, when citizens indulged in the self-destructive impulse to burn their own communities to express rage at the machine.

Here’s the thing:

Things aren’t so bad. Yes, you read that right. Here’s my very unscientific reasons for why people aren’t rioting in the streets.

1. If a person has a job, he’s not putting himself in the position of losing it by skipping work to riot.
2. People are protesting, just not what the social justice types want to have protested. People aren’t desiring more bailouts, personally or otherwise. They want less. It’s called a Tea Party. April 15 will be eye-opening to these sociology professors. The producers are sick to death of being asked to bail out the non-producers.

This is not a recession from barely making it to starving. This is a recession from want to need. People are recalibrating meeting their needs. They want the government to do the same thing.

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  • Ronald Hayden

    It is very important not to fall into the idea that things are actually as bad as they were during the depression. With apologies to those who have or will lose their jobs before we get through this, we’re all MUCH better off than people were back then. These days food is cheap and plentiful; back then food cost a large percentage of a family’s budget. These days clothing is plentiful and cheap; back then clothing was expensive and only the wealthy had wardrobes as extensive as any teenager does today.

    As a crass way of expressing it, when someone starts talking about how bad things are today, I suggest they give me their high-quality car and television, their Xbox and iPod/iPhone, along with their access to cheap food, after which we can start talking about how bad things are…

    Of course some families are going to have a rough time; but even what we find tough is likely to be much less severe than things were during the depression (or heck better than things were for most during the “good times” back then).

  • Trish

    Ronald–

    I don’t have any of those things. I have had to sell some of my possessions this year in order to buy food, because the so-called government fail-safe programs do not work.
    My teenager is literally wearing rags (not totally for economic reasons, I admit; I’d mend some of them if I could get them off his back),we have no expensive now-generation gaming system, nor do we have an ipod/phone. We scrape by with minimal internet coverage because that is how one achieves employment in this day and age. If it weren’t necessary, we’d drop it in a hot minute.

    But no, my parents never had to sell their belongings for food, and I have, so your very complacent evaluation is wrong. This is worse than the depression, because now we are going to starve to death on the taxpayer’s dime.

    You’re all right,Jack. Fine. The rest of us aren’t. That may be fine with you, but it’s exactly the reason that vile overwhelming governments have taken hold in the world. They promise the opportunity you will not allow capitalism to offer.

  • http://noslaves.blogspot.com/ Artruen

    Trish, I will assume you are telling a true story but there is an army of obamonauts patrolling conservative blogs and your post may just be a subtle change in tactics.
    Not even our illegals are going hungry where I live, they all have cell phones and televisions. Pretty good for (one) here illegally (two) poor.
    I wonder where you live and how you arrived at your present situation? I am trying to be sensitive to your situation. What does “They promise the opportunity you will not allow capitalism to offer.” mean?
    anyway, help me understand your post.

  • Ronald Hayden

    I truly feel bad for anyone in the situation described above. I have known poverty, so I’m no stranger. As a teenager my six person family lived in a tent in a park for a while, then in a small hotel room, I was unable to go to college, etc.

    Yet we — and I’m going to be crude and say you too — were much better off than we would have been a hundred years ago, and I was able to go onto a successful career thanks to meritocracy and living in a part of the country that wasn’t too obsessed with college degrees and the like.

    Times are and will be tough for many, but they would be vastly tougher were it not for the fruits of capitalism that have raised our lifestyles an unprecedented degree in the last century.

    There are problems with our system, some caused by capitalism, but many more (I claim) by government intervention. A good example is the employer-based health insurance system. That came about because around WWII the government capped wages, forcing employers to find creative ways to keep their best employees — the government didn’t tax health benefits, so we ended up with our current system. We can only imagine what may come of the government controls being imposed today of a similar nature.

    In any case, I realize that my saying that we’re almost all better off because we no longer have three families huddled around a stove in a tiny rat-infested tenement with one set of clothes and a few morsels of food costing a day’s wages is not much comfort.