poor white republicans

[joanna bujes]

At 05:18 PM 02/25/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I'll never forget the day I came home for my first visit after I had been at
>college for a semester.  I went in to say "hey" to all my former co-workers
>at the restaurant where I worked since I was 14.  We were all good buddies
>and did everything together, but when I walked in the back kitchen door to
>say hi, one of my best friends there looked at me and said, "Why are you
>here? You just think you're better than us now because you are in school."
>That was the last time I have seen any of them.  I think therein may lie an
>answer in terms of working class and poor whites.  They feel disenfranchized
>as hell. They feel stuck.  They feel all sorts of things, so they take it
>out on whoever they can to feel that they have some sort of power, or some
>sort of say in the world since they don't have any over their own lives.  I
>don't know them now, but I bet they are behind this war 100%.

Thanks for writing. It will be a wonderful world when college is no longer 
a pre-requisite for a decent human life. It really burns me up when I see 
one of these "ghetto genius goes to college" movies and notice that the 
secondary plot is invariably "if you don't make it into college, you 
deserve to live like a cockroach."

Joanna