I'm right Jacked off

Are you angry? Think carefully before you answer; according to our media of late, being "angry" makes you a nutjob at best and very probably a dangerous one who should be shut down at all costs.

It's the latest effort to frame anybody who feels in any way disenfranchised by Fabian policies as somehow inferior to those calm, righteous, rational thinkers who know what's best for us, whatever we may think we want. Along the way it allows for a convenient dismissal of any valid concerns they may have and of course much juvenile sarcasm, the favoured weapon of mean schoolgirls everywhere.

It's an interesting and hypocritical piece of framing, since the politics of the left have always themselves been based on anger and resentment, but of course that side of the political/media complex is now occupied by well-educated, well-paid apparatchiks, which makes the traditional claims of victimhood a bit hard to swallow. The narrative has therefore been shifted to the demonisation and derogation of the marginalised. Machiavelli would be proud.

In this political narrative, white men are all sitting pretty in positions of ease and power while their women folk toil ceaselessly to keep them there - or something like that, my eyes usually start glazing at the first use of "patriarchy". In the piece I referenced in that last link, the author claims that boys don't need to be educated, since they'll just be handed life on a platter. Of course, the author is a well-to-do mother of girls and is herself the recipient of an excellent education who works part-time of her own choosing  and "continues every couple of weeks to visit the farm where her husband, who has a consultancy business in the wine industry, has a motley crew of Angus cattle and is going to breed Speckle Park cattle". No, no, I musn't get angry...

The fact is, of course, that anger is rarely unmotivated except in those with some form of personality disorder, which is why its use as a pejorative has become so popular; these people are obviously mad, try not to let them near the silverware. The reality is that a great many angry people have very good reason to be.

The "angry white male" who can't find work because he has "only" a school certificate and even basic jobs require ridiculous and meaningless jumping through qualifying hoops has every reason to be angry. The "angry white male" who has to fund his own legal proceedings (or more likely try and fail to self-represent) in divorce, while his ex-wife is fully funded through legal aid has every reason to be angry. The father who watches his son being left behind by an educational system that has over 40 years been tailored to suit girls has every reason to be angry.

The fact that the ways in which people express their anger are sometimes not acceptable to the oh-so-genteel ladies and gentlemen of the press does not in any way diminish its basis in a genuine lived experience. Sure, a yobbo from the outer suburbs may not have it as tough as his contemporaries in detention camps or an Aboriginal community in the sticks, but there is a much smaller gap between them than there is between him and the supercilious, self-satisfied Malcolm Farr, Jane Caro, Andrew Bolt or Mark Kenny. He knows that every advantage given to new arrivals is at the expense of his own opportunity to do any better than struggle for survival. He knows that when he was growing up it was reasonable to expect that as an adult he would be able, as a working class man, to afford to support a wife and a couple of kids, take a holiday at the beach for four weeks once a year, buy a home and realistically aspire to the latest new Holden or Ford. None of those are now part of the landscape for a large part of our population and that fraction is increasing every year.

Those people feel let down very badly and they have every right to be angry. They take out their anger in many self-destructive ways, including drink and drugs, which of course, our clueless pundits tell us only goes to show they weren't fit for polite society anyway, so there! Some of them become violent or look for others to blame, which is used to justify more demonisation and nobody thinks that maybe, just maybe, there's something rotten in the system. After all, "I'm all right, Jack".

I should make clear that I am not writing this in support of David Leyonhelm or Pauline Hanson, the majority of whose policies I abhor. Nor am I arguing against proper assistance for refugees, victims of domestic violence, Aborigines or other marginalised groups. I am not condoning the actions of the fuckwits who stormed the church in Gosford.

All I am saying is that if we, as a nation, do not start recognising and properly addressing the very real motivating forces behind "angry white men", then we are going to reap an increasingly bitter harvest. Domestic violence will increase, drug and alcohol abuse ditto. Politics will become increasingly driven by hatred and division, not by goodwill and inclusion and that cannot end well.