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Why the White Working Class Is Falling Behind

cpwill

cpwill

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This dovetails pretty well with the statistical opus Coming Apart, by Charles Murray, on the bifurcating state of white America.

In Middletown, 20 percent of the public high school’s entering freshmen won’t make it to graduation. Most won’t graduate from college. Virtually no one will go to college out of state. Students don’t expect much from themselves, because the people around them don’t do very much....

There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties. The first are lucky: They come from wealthy families with connections, and their lives were set from the moment they were born. The second are the meritocratic: They were born with brains and couldn’t fail if they tried. Because very few in Middletown fall into the former category, people assume that everyone who makes it is just really smart. To the average Middletonian, hard work doesn’t matter as much as raw talent. It’s not like parents and teachers never mention hard work. Nor do they walk around loudly proclaiming that they expect their children to turn out poorly. These attitudes lurk below the surface, less in what people say than in how they act. One of our neighbors was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she’d blather on about the importance of industriousness. “So many people abuse the system, it’s impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need,” she’d say. This was the construct she’d built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she — despite never having worked in her life — was an obvious exception...

People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. During the 2012 election cycle, the Public Religion Institute, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on working-class whites. It found, among other things, that working-class whites worked more hours than college-educated whites. But the idea that the average working-class white works more hours is demonstrably false. The Public Religion Institute based its results on surveys — essentially, they called around and asked people what they thought. The only thing that report proves is that many folks talk about working more than they actually work....
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No matter how many times that I cut this damn board it is still too short. ;)

Doing the same thing over and over and yet always expecting a better result.
 
Yeah my kids just started school back and are complaining about homework. My response to them is easy. You want good grades you have to work for it.
You don't get it by just not doing anything or waiting for someone else to do it.

you get good grades by the effort that you put out.
 
I don't think this problem is particularly unique to the white middle class in today's society.
 
Them lazy whippersnappers! Back in my day, i had to walk uphill to school, both ways, and it snowed until June! We didn't have all this free internet porn; my brothers and i had to share a May 1961 edition of playboy magazine, and we were thankful! For dinner, my dear sweet mother slaved over a hot stove for 8 hours, cooking pot roast, and it was absolutely delicious! My poor father had to be up by 4 AM to travel 50 miles to the factory working 16 hour shifts, where he made $50 dollars a week; he never once complained!

Those were the good old days, when everybody pulled their weight; gee that old LaSalle ran great!

/sarcasm off
 
Yep, it's allll laziness. There are plenty of terrific jobs for every working class American without a college education. :lamo
 
DifferentDrummr said:
Yep, it's allll laziness. There are plenty of terrific jobs for every working class American without a college education. :lamo
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And what does that have to do with working 20 hours or less per week?
 
CycloneWanderer said:
I don't think this problem[laziness] [detailed by Charles Murray] is particularly unique to the white middle class in today's society.
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true, emotional survival-not working, accomplishing, and contributing - is the goal today in the wake of the treasonous and successful liberal attack on the families, schools, and religions of America. America is being hollowed out just as the communists want.
 
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