We live in a hierarchy breeding ground

It was a long day. You had to work overtime for the third day this week to finish one of a dozen projects you were working on that seemed more like busy work than advancing any goal.

That college degree you are still paying for 10 year’s later has nothing to do with the job you are now working. Your old car is in the shop, again, but who can afford a new one at $50,000? Your rent has gone up 50 percent in the last three years. Buying a home? Forget it.

How, you wonder, did you end up like this? Whos fault is it?

Well, there are lots of folks these days who will tell you exactly who they believe is to blame for your lot, from influencers on social media, to politicians and billionaires running giant corporations. Your plight, they insist, is caused by LGBT, or BLM, or Antifa or the Chinese buying up all the land in Texas or immigrants or the homeless.

Then there are those teachers grooming your children to be sexual perverts, or teaching them history or science, that must be reined in. Restrict their freedom, marginalize all of them, and your problems are over. They are the ones ruining society, taking your jobs, corrupting your children. But it’s just a distraction.

We spend our lives climbing social ladders. But we can never be free in a hierarchy breeding ground. The ladder our parents bequeath to us when we become adults too often in our society has no rungs. It’s not our parent’s fault, any more than it is the fault of all those people who politicians tell us we should blame. We are blamed for not climbing that ladder by the same forces that are actively removing the steps.

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Our social structures, our hierarchies, are not natural occurrences. We have created them rung by rung over centuries. But those social structures have been captured by very wealthy powerful people for their own ends, which is to elevate themselves by diminishing the rest of us.

We are being told by politicians and corporations that we don’t have the economic means as a country to solve social problems like poverty, hunger, universal medical care, and homelessness. This is a lie. We are a sovereign country. We have unlimited economic wealth. The real problem is that 95 percent of our country’s wealth has been captured by five percent of our population.

When politicians point their fingers at all the “others” as the cause of your struggles, they are simply lying, hoping you won’t notice the hand that is holding society hostage.

Can we really be free in a hierarchy breeding ground? Think about it.

Jim Powers writes opinion columns. Those opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this publication.