Why Pundits, Journalists and Bloggers Don’t Get Hard Times

We’ve read over and over that the great recession is behind us, although evidence of human suffering abounds. This is not a new phenomenon, and it was ably described a lifetime ago by Eugene V. Debs:

It is easy enough for a gentleman of education and refinement to sit at his typewriter and point out the crimes of the workers. But let him be one of them himself, reared in hard poverty, denied education, thrown into the brute struggle for existence from childhood, oppressed, exploited, forced to strike, clubbed by the police, jailed while his family is evicted, and his wife and children are hungry, and he will hesitate to condemn these as criminals who fight against the crimes of which they are the victims of such savage methods as have been forced upon them by their masters.

Debs of course was the labor organizer who ran several times as the Socialist candidate for president. His words, although in context refer to violent and deplorable acts, remind this blogger that the hard life is difficult to witness from an air-conditioned office. And it seems clear, given the myopic coverage of our increasingly inequitable society, the media blindness is widespread. Here the work of independent and citizen journalists, who are often themselves working for scraps, becomes even more vital.

This Thanksgiving, let us be thankful for what we have, and angry for what billions more have not.

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer