After reading this tweet (see image below), I decided to just paste it, and let it speak for itself.
This tweeter’s message is that fast food workers insult our troops by asking for pay similar to what the troops get. It would be more logical to argue our troops should get a raise because they only get civilian fast food pay; but never mind, these people aren’t logical.
Even by the gutter standards of rightwing propaganda, exploiting our underpaid soldiers to justify below-poverty wages and oppose a minimum wage increase is crass. Even Red States are joining the parade of non-federal jurisdictions raising local minimum wages.
I know where this comes from. It’s the fruit of GOP agitation against workers, especially the working poor. By their logic, which values everything with dollars, you can’t earn exemption from their scorn by working full-time at a hard and dirty job no one else wants to do (e.g., sweeping streets, picking up other people’s trash, lifting patients in a nursing home, etc.), because if you earn the low wages they like to pay it signifies you’re (choose adjective) lazy, immoral, stupid, uneducated, or on drugs.
In the new economy of declining wages, the only way to escape such condemnation is by leaving the labor force, which millions of Americans are doing, as indicated by America’s plunging workforce participation rate. (This statistic measures the percentage of able-bodied working-age adults who are employed or seeking work.)
America didn’t always talk to itself like this. Not long ago, Americans believed there’s dignity in all work, and holding a job is presumptive proof of a person’s work ethic. People extolled America’s work ethic, regardless of what jobs paid, because they rightly believed hard work built America and kept it great.
But that has been turned on its head by a faction that seeks political advantage by creating social divisions through setting groups of people against each another. We don’t have to buy into this, though. You can’t change the attitude of a Jennifer Harris. But you can prevent voices like hers from becoming a prevailing force in our society by making sure you VOTE, and using your vote to say “no” to the stupid and cruel politics of lifting some people by putting others down. Most of us outgrew this kind of immaturity after
high school.