It’s turning out to be a very interesting few years lately, now that we’re heading into the decade of the recession. While an economist might argue the recession is over, another might claim it’s still in the future, and another might chime in with the idea that it’s really a depression, and yet one more might claim things have never been better, the simple fact of the matter is that times are tight, and times are tough for a lot of people. If you buy into the lie that Americans are famous for sticking together, you’d be waiting for those Americans to band together and look out for one another. If you buy into the idea that banding together is a crock of crap, you’d probably recognize it when Americans have a tendency to kick anyone who is down and then point fingers, blaming that person for all of the troubles.

Unfortunately, the latter is how we’re responding to pretty much everything. In Michigan, for example, the legislators realized that obviously the people causing all of the problems must be teachers, and have now met and decided that they would tax teachers more (causing them to pay more money for their health care). The teachers, letting their response come from their union, have indicated that they are shocked that the people can so easily turn against them, especially when they are the ones teaching little Johnny to read. Well, if you listen to the people of Michigan, you might start to wonder how it is that the common person has become such a critic of anyone who would dare to be a teacher in this state. Some of the comments are outright hostile, and anyone who comes into the conversation backing teachers is immediately branded as stupid, corrupt, and some kind of radical communist who is teaching Johnny to build napalm bombs to kill all of Johnny’s friends at school.

When did it get to be this way? I know there was a recent batch of hostility towards community college professors for making over $100,000 a year in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being a community college professor, although part time, I found myself shocked that the population of the city (and state) was nothing but hostile towards teachers. It was as if they were personally paying for these salaries from their own money, and because they weren’t making $100,000 themselves, no one else deserved it.

Now, I’ve come to the conclusion as to why those professors do make over $100,000 a year. This summer, I was offered absolutely no classes to teach as an adjunct (which is the lowest pay of any kind of instructor). Instead, the full-time instructors get first grab at all classes, and of course, they get the premium rate for taking those classes. Thus, their pay aut0matically heads up to those $100,000 figures we were talking about. The solution is simple: Hire adjuncts who are struggling to survive as it is. But instead, they hire the guys (and gals) who are arguably overpaid for the semesters they have already taught. The conclusions are obvious, but no one seems to figure it out, and thus, people will continue to complain.

But back to the hostility towards instructors and teachers. My opinion on this is that people really aren’t anti-teachers themselves but are anti-union, because the unions involved in these decisions are beholden to a tenure structure that massively benefits these teachers. Most every other worker in the state is not a member of a union with such power and prestige, so all they can see is that this class of workers is highly compensated and protected, and the average citizen is never offered the same kinds of protections themselves.

An example is my own job. I’m an at will employee, mainly because I do not belong to a union. I’m not advocating one, by the way, but at the same time because none of us have a union that we belong to, we have no such protections that these teachers all seem to have in their corners. It should not be surprising that those without the same protections are going to see those who are protected as “others” and thus, someone to be criticized for excess and outrageous behavior. It doesn’t take much of an analysis to see how a person in a union of such protection would then be perceived as someone who has too much of a good thing. And then you have a whole bunch of people running around hating teachers. The one to one logic doesn’t follow, but the eventual demise into hatred towards a class of people makes sense, especially if you understand group mob-like mentality.

If one is capable of distincing oneself from the passions of this argumentation, one is then also capable of seeing what is really happening in the background. There are people who benefit from this hostility, and they’re often never even involved in the discussions. I’m talking about corporate leaders and politicians who dig into this rhetoric, using it to feed entire careers of corrupt government service. I say corrupt because when you use the passions of people to rile them up and then benefit from stupidity, all the while doing nothing to solve anything, that’s corruption by manipulation of the masses. Yet, this happens all of the time, and continues to happen to this day.

This is why the whole debacle in Wisconsin took place. Politicians, enriching themselves on hatred and anger, orchestrated people to do all sorts of stupid things at no benefit to the people, yet in great benefit to people in power who seek to continue manipulating power. No one else benefits. Instead, people lost rights, money and power, all in the name of some other people using them through continued manipulation.

It’s happening in Michigan right now. We live in a very poor state that is suffering because a lot of very bad, corrupt politicians really only saw the benefits for themselves by rallying up the masses to make stupid decisions for themselves. Look at Detroit if you need to see a great example of this. Corrupt politicians, hiding money they stole directly from the people, cheated the people by promising to be something yet delivering the complete opposite. And then when they were called to account for their misdeeds, they claimed they were targets of politics or racism, or whatever else they could come up with to continue rallying the people behind them while they socked away more money before they were thrown from office (and sometimes directly into prison so they can wait it out before they are able to cheat the people again). Meanwhile, they continue to pretend that the people need to support them at their own best interest, and as always the people end up being screwed.

And when it comes down to it, some politician will use ridiculous rhetoric to lead the people down the wrong path again. And we’ll follow. As we always do.

Because we’re stupid. And to justify our stupidity, we’ll point our fingers at someone else who is probably just going about his business doing something that doesn’t affect anyone else in a bad way. And we’ll pounce on him. Hard.

Because we’re stupid. And we don’t know how to do it any other way.