The meme is the massage

This meme is the perfect illustration of how the rich steal from the middle class and then convince the middle class to blame the poor.

It is meant to vilify the poor hamburger flipper who supposedly is taking away from the others by demanding $15 an hour for his work, when what is really wrong here is the other three are grossly underpaid. It's interesting to note that all three are public servants, paid by government entities that across the nation have done everything they can to neutralize their labor unions.

What's sad is people keep posting this message and commenting on the posts without really questioning what it means. The poor, the hamburger flippers and the 7-11 clerks, the Walmart employees who qualify for food stamps and, yes, even those on welfare are not the bad guys here. The bad guys are the city officials who would only pay a policeman $18.27 an hour or the fireman, $16.04 an hour or the paramedic $15.59 an hour. Think about what those people do, and the risks some of them take to protect the public and then try to defend those wages. Those wages are indefensible and those people are not paid by the same people who pay hamburger flippers so the only penalty those public servants suffer is it costs them the nickel more they have to pay for a Big Mac because they can't afford a decent meal.

But the buck doesn't stop with public officials strapped for funding just to keep their city services operating. Think at least one step further. Where does the money to fund government services come from? It comes from taxpayers and when you have huge corporations taking billions in subsidies from the government and paying little or no taxes on their income, there is where the disconnect is.

But the titans of industry have managed to wage and are winning the war of the minds when somebody posts a meme like this one blaming the hamburger flipper for wanting a living wage.

What is equally sad is there are so many people willing to believe this without question. Want to find a culprit again? It would be easy to blame the education system. We are not teaching our kids to think and question so when something like this on the surface appears to confirm the fears and insecurities that come up from every angle, they believe it without the slightest hesitation.

And who controls the purse strings for education? Follow the same path to the same institutions. In a way by squeezing education (and blaming underpaid teachers in the process) the outcome is a dumbing down of the general population which in turn makes it easier to manipulate and the whole corrupting influence goes deeper into the fabric or our supposedly democratic society.

This part of the process is particularly dismaying. I know the young fellow who posted that meme on his facebook page. That is how I came to see it this time. He is a contemporary of my son's and a young man over whom I had some bit of influence. I think now if I had only had the foresight to at least encourage him to question and challenge things, maybe he wouldn't be believing and passing on this sort of propaganda.

And that's all it really is, propaganda, an effort published through innocents to gain even more control over the economy and fill the vaults in foreign countries with American money produced by underpaid American labor and often from profits made by selling to Americans, to satisfy the unmitigated greed of the one percenters.

During the Vietnam War and civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s a particular message kept showing up on demonstrators' signs. It read: "Question everything." Perhaps it's time to wave that sign again.

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan