The $19-an-Hour Bastards Who Are Destroying the Nation

Digby:

Here's another one of those greedy bastards who's trying to destroy America:

He is worried, he says, about a lot: the future of the bankrupt supermarket chain he works for, the midcareer colleagues who feel trapped and hopeless, and anyone, really, who strives for a middle-class life anymore.

He's been stocking shelves and moving groceries through the checkout line for the same Philadelphia-area chain since the Vietnam War. It's how he put a child through college, bought a $28,000 rowhouse, and pays for the occasional movie when he and his wife go out for a treat.

He is reluctant to have his name published in The Inquirer, even though he belongs to a union. Partly, it seems, because he belongs to a union. And partly because it feels like a scary time to be a worker in this country at all - union or not.

"I'm afraid I'd be retaliated against," he says, in a tone so evenhanded, so unassuming, that during the first, the second, and even the third time we talked, it was hard to resist wanting to hear more from him.

When reader and reporter finally met after two years of occasional phone chats, the blogosphere, and the so-called cable-news pundits were bloviating about assaults by Republican governors against public-sector unions in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and elsewhere. (Time will tell whether this remains an exclusively Republican pursuit.)

Against all the raucous blah-blah-blahs, his middle-of-the-road wisdom was humbling.

Yes it is. But it's the voice of many millions of Americans who are under attack by their fellows who have been brainwashed into believing that the problem in their lives isn't the John Galts who are gobbling up ever more of the nation's wealth but their middle class neighbors who've been able to live a decent middle class life working at a decent middle class job.

These are the people that the well-heeled Andrea Mitchells and Gloria Borgers of the world are saying must be willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

Read the whole thing.