I live in a gentrified neighborhood.
At least that’s what I found out recently, when I spoke to a longtime area resident who informed me that “the damn hipsters came in and ruined everything.”
He didn’t consider me an invader, even though I moved into the neighborhood just two years ago. I presume my Latino status prevents me from being one of those evil hipsters (well, that and the fact that my iPod doesn’t have a single Belle & Sebastian song on it).
Like many ethnic minorities, I have been accused more than once of hating white people.
But for someone who despises the white race, I am seriously guilty of fraternizing with the enemy. I don’t want to get into the whole “some of my best friends” are this or that, but I’ll just mention that my wife (of German ancestry) would be a little peeved to find out about my deep-seeded hatred of white people.
I guess I’m also wracked with self-loathing, because (as I’ve pointed out many times) I’m half-white myself (on my father’s side).
I once hurt someone’s feelings, and not via my usual method of making an ill-timed, biting joke. No, I disappointed my friend because I said that eradicating racism is impossible.
She is a hippie type who inexplicably thinks that someday humanity will get its act together and take a break from the self-slaughtering. But that will never happen — at least not completely, everywhere on the globe.
Well, there is one solution…
“There’s class warfare, alright. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war. And we’re winning.”
—Warren Buffett
Eat the rich!
—Aerosmith
In Manlio’s Argueta’s gripping novel, One Day of Life, soldiers of a repressive Central American government beat and abuse poor villagers. The peasants’ crime, as one militaristic thug puts it, is that “they don’t love the rich.”
It’s a rather harsh reaction to expressing displeasure with the ruling class. We haven’t come to that in the United States, at least not yet.
Still, the concept of class warfare, invoked primarily by right-wing politicians, holds that middle-class and poor people are simply jealous of rich individuals, or that they are being riled up to hate the wealthy.
