I am quite certain that almost every American is aware of the unemployment problem in this country. For those of you still amazingly unaware, over 81,000 jobs have been lost this year. Unemployment offices across the nation are suddenly swamped with applications. Thousands of people are losing what they consider to be their lives; vehicles, homes, marriage…food on the table.

Even for those of us fortunate to have a good job (which I will define shortly) life is increasingly difficult. As each day passes inexorably forward prices across the board continue to rise. Food, fuel, books, in short, inflation is no longer battering at the gates, it is now ransacking the cities and homes of our land.

As I said above, those of us to be employed with a good job are feeling the effects of this overpowering recession. And the people with good jobs are really only inconvenienced; for the vast majority of the country a ‘good job’ is a nothing more than a pipe dream. A good job is one that pays well and on time. It is a job from an employer that consistently manages to uphold their end of the bargain, permitting you to leave at the set time, allowing you those two days off a week, giving you the holidays promised off. A good job is one where you find yourself working in an environment which allows you to get and go and get a drink, or a snack, or perhaps to have a cigarette, when you want and outside of federally mandated break times.

Most Americans do not have that sort of job. Most Americans work a job that is tiring, miserable, and in short, degrading to the human condition. I’ve personally seen workers threatened for possessing the audacity to leave their work area for a drink when it was not an approved break time. I’ve witnessed supervisors’ pressure employees into working on a day off, by utilizing scare tactics such as the loss of their job. I’ve seen people come into work for a ten hour day and not be allowed to leave until fourteen hours have passed, again, threatened with termination should they demand to leave on time. I have witnessed people come to work day-by-day, tired and frustrated, concerned and worried, because they have yet to receive their first paycheck; and this after a month of employment. Worse, I’ve seen people who have worked for the same company for a great deal of time fail to be paid for weeks on end. All in all I’ve seen wealthy corporations use and abuse the very people who enable them their wealth and pampered life.

Good jobs as compared to the myriad assortment and all to easily obtained soul-crushing types of jobs, are rare. It took me over six months of relentless searching to find a ‘good’ job. And I only managed that job due to my experience in the military. I have no college degree to use on my lengthy resume. Many Americans have no college degree to use on a resume, and yet they are more than capable of performing the functions of many jobs. For example, many employers require a bachelor’s degree for such jobs as warehouse management; a monkey can run a warehouse. I know this because for nearly a decade I worked in and around warehouses for the military and I may assure you, it is not a difficult job. But, companies want the added benefit of a bullshit business degree before they will allow you the misfortune of working for them. This sort of practice, America, is nothing more than the gentrification of American society.

This devolution to the once gratefully forgotten feudalistic society is a diametric opposite to the time-honored values of this nation. This land was founded on a different set of values and principles. This nation was built on the idea that wealth could, and should, be obtained by every person who calls America his or her home. And it has worked, too well. The majority of wealth in our homeland is not evenly distributed among the majority of the populace. Instead it is locked securely away by the extremely, and horrendously wealthy elite upper class, a paltry few. These obscenely wealthy individuals are the new nobility, the gentry of 21ST Century America.

With a decaying economy, a government rife and replete with greedy, corrupt officials, a steadily (even rapid) decline in the educated and informed youth, and the innate sense of entitlement our population displays, our nation is on a collision course with ruin. Combine the aforementioned with the extremely wealthy and highly educated corporate tyrants our laws have not only protected, but aided and enabled, and you have found the grandest and most failsafe manner of creating a society based on class divisions.

If our society allows this behavior to continue then we must all ask the hard question: Why did we bother with a revolution at all?

Out.