Most days I get up extra early and work a little O/T. Even with time and a half  it’s a fourth of what I used to make. I barely squeak by each month without dipping into retirement savings or taking a quickie loan, and that’s with zero debt living incredibly frugally. I’m not exaggerating folks, after a lifetime as a successful executive managing millions of dollars, on an inflation adjusted basis I now make at age fifty what I made at age fifteen working as a dishwasher in a barbecue joint. And every morning a neighbor, we’ll call him Ben, is out on his porch sipping coffee taking it easy: Ben is on some kind of disability, he hurt his back a few years ago, doesn’t work at all and he brings home almost exactly what I do every month. In fact, Ben actually has more disposable income than I do because he doesn’t have to pay for gas to go to work and maintenance on a vehicle to take him there, or work clothes, or cover tolls, or buy lunch on the fly, and all the things working people have to do.

To make matters worse, by the time I get home, 10 hours later, Ben is shitfaced, he’s obviously an alcoholic, at which point he wants me stop and chat. Chatting with Ben is frustrating, I’m beat, I usually have writing projects facing me, it’s getting hot outside. But Ben wants to fill me in on whatever trivial drama happened that day — he would talk for an hour straight if I let him, mostly repeating himself over and over — and sometimes he snaps into that lovely drunken belligerent mode we all know if and when I try to make a polite excuse to get to the sanctuary of air conditioning and home.

It would be super easy for me to get angry at this state of affairs and focus it on Ben and his benefits. Here I am, working for peanuts, driving a piece of shit ten year-old car on its last legs — car payments are simply not an option at my current wage. There’s basically zero chance for advancement anytime soon at my job, even though I have more than twice the years of experience doing my boss’s job than my boss and his boss combined. The reason I don’t fall into that seductive trap is 1) I understand how disbilities work, an injury that prevents one from consistently working every day doesn’t have to be that severe or obvious, 2) Ben paid into the system just like anyone else, so he’s entitled to the benefits, and 3) It’s not like he caused the economic mess; the people who did are living high on the hog thanks in part to my tax dollars while lecturing the rest of us on the noble dignity of hard work.

Not everyone will think this through, though. The recession brings misery, paycuts, unemployment and fear. Resentment and envy are irrational emotions, they should be directed at the assholes rewarded with millions for smashing the economy, but they actually find a target among the people immediately around us. Like Ben. Not to mention it’s way safer and much easier to pick on the weak person in front of you than the rich and powerful one you rarely see.

That’s one of many evils of the Great Recession, that’s the anger right-wingers tap into. Illustrated by a great anecdote: A zillionaire, a blue-collar conservative and a progressive sit down at a plate of ten cookies. The zillionaire immediately snatches nine cookies and then whispers to the conservative “I think he’s gonna try to steal your cookie!” It’s a self reinforcing cycle of anger and resentment which conservatives have learned to milk at every stage. I actually listened to a friend of mine blaming unions for taking down GM, the auto company that had to be bailed out by government money (The contempt for the word government was crystal clear, she practically spat it out). But she didn’t think that up by herself. It’s been paraded in front of her by scads of sources that conveniently forget to mention the banking, investment, and insurance industries, the ones that directly crashed the economy and had to be bailed out to the tune of a trillion dollars of government money, are about as non-unionized as it gets.

This is why I really worry that America’s best days are over, or at least mine are. It’s easy to say people are stupid, the truth is people are scared and pissed off, and a highly effective social apparatus has developed to stoke that anger, to feed them misinformation, to direct it into bullying and blaming the institutions that protect the middle class and could prevent another great crash from happening, while lavishing praise and rewards on the very people who caused the mess and who are proudly running on a platform of doing exactly the same thing over and over and over. If those assholes win in 2012, and they really do it over and over, the eventual failure and crash might finally reach a point where even a nation as powerful and rich as the US was a few years ago ends up in a hole so deep it cannot climb out in my lifetime.