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[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller

A comment on the Forsetti piece posted by Thurgreed.

There is far, far more truth in the article than most people realize. I qualify as a coastal elitist. I am the poster boy for coastal elites. Born in NYC suburbs, Ivy education, career in Washington.

Oddly, my closest lifelong friends are the thirty or so people who passed through my combat platoon lo these 45 years ago. They are, by and large, flyover state people who are utterly incapable of realizing that the government is the only reason they have even a semblance of middle class life. They scapegoat. They blame the government for their failure to move up the economic ladder, notwithstanding that virtually every one of them that did get a college education got it at a state university for a pittance. They cannot understand the enormous changes of globalization. They only know that they are worse off than their parents, they don't come home to an Ozzie and Harriet marriage, and their kids have even fewer prospect than they did.


Generalizations are always flawed, but even those in this group who aren't fundamentalist know nothings have a willful blindness to the causes of their situation. In the run-up to this year's reunion, these men who I love were vehement Trumpeteers on social media. My closest friend in the group, a Californian, decided it was best if he didn't attend. I agreed, and stayed away.

There is one point in the Forsetti article I would personally disagree with. I WOULD come for their god damn guns, in the sense that civilians should not have AR 15s. I would tighten penalties on gun owners who don't secure their weapons. I know, first hand, what these machines can do. If your unemployed, bullied, meth addled son gets your semiautomatic rifle and sprays his high school it, you have committed murder. But that's just a coastal elitist view.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/28/us/ohi...ter/index.html

TM