Self-Fulfilling Persecution

One pattern that keeps cropping up over and over again is the majority claiming they are being persecuted. That's cute. We see it with the top 1% and Wall Street screaming "Class warfare!" over the protests on Wall Street. That's so adorable. Or the Evangelical Christians claiming they are being persecuted in this country... also incredibly adorable. Or Apple users claiming they are misunderstood and everyone hates them because they use Apple products... you don't get anything cuter than that.

Take for instance the "class warfare" being committed the Occupy Wall Street protests. The wealthiest of all the wealthy hold the most money in this country, as well as the most political pull in Washington (giving them a lot of power), and yet claim class warfare is being committed upon them. I can't tell you how cute this is. If you hold all the money and all the power, you will be the ones committing class warfare. That's generally how class warfare works. Those with the power and money will keep everyone below a certain income level at the bottom, if not simply run them even further into the ground.

The problem is that the supposed "persecution" will inevitably become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There will come a point when the bottom of the economic barrel can no longer sustain their own existence, and with advertisements for iPads and Droid phones being shoved in their faces, without any means to get access to these products and goods (especially if welfare is cut), they will rise up. They will do exactly what Glenn Beck hysterically said they would do : drag you out of your homes and kill you in the street. And while Beck is a moron who is completely over exaggerating, albeit I do not ever think it will come to "dragging you out of your house and kill you in the street", if the masses are not provided for, then they will do exactly that. It's called "bread and circuses" : keep them fed and entertained and they will stay out of politics and not rise up. Too bad the Romans failed to do this for the tribes they conquered, which led to the demise of Rome.

Again, when the market is skewed, heaven forbid if a marketing target isn't the majority. Take for instance chocolate. I'm a guy and I love chocolate. I like Lindt and Dove and Ghiridelli and... and well almost any kind of chocolate (and I know plenty of other guys who do too). What is the target market for chocolate? Women. They forget that men like chocolate too! And heaven forbid if Dr. Pepper decides to market a low calorie soft drink for men! Some women think Dr. Pepper 10 is chauvinistic for not being marketed to women as well. Well, when everything gets marketed for women, and occasionally for men as well, because some women claim chauvinism on everything (I read an article once on how scientific writings are chauvinistic (sorry for the meta-parenthesis, but that article has some validity)). But their crusade, like any crusade, tends to put them in a bind. Sometimes things are for men. Sometimes things are for women. And sometimes they aren't chauvinistic. If I may quote Freud : sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But when a cigar is just a cigar and something else is imposed on the cigar, that's when trouble comes knocking.

Or again, Apple users claim they are misunderstood as creative artists. SO ADORABLE! I sit in Architecture In Theory class every Wednesday and see 7 of 18 people (including the instructor) using Apples, while only two use a Dell and an Acer, two people sleep, and the rest of us use an old fashion pen and paper. Funny thing is the Apple users all tend to sit on one side of the round table set up, so I always see seven Apple icons in a row. If you're the majority, how are you misunderstood? If anything, the people who get grief for using PCs are misunderstood, because not a lot of people understand them for using something that's not an Apple. If I may use Maddox's rhetoric : what's the only thing PC users can do that Mac users can't do? Shutting the hell up.

I could rag on Christians, Muslims, conservatives, Fox News, architects, liberals, Obama, Thomas Edison, et cetera, but that would be too easy. So I leave all of this with an example most of us have gone through : hating your parents. There comes a point when you think your parents hate you so much that eventually it becomes self-fulfilling. If you think your parents ground you because they hate you, they will just ground you for your rhetoric. I had a friend in high school who talked about how his dad used to hate him so much that his dad would beat him. It all ended when he got into an actual fight with his dad because he was taken home by the cops, and ended up killing his father. Prophecy fulfilled.

If you hoist yourself on your own cross to show you are being persecuted, then you are only persecuting yourself. So get down off your cross, use the wood to build a bridge and get over it.