does every day. And I mean a guy with a pretty good job and life by most of our standards.
I know one family that was only upper middle class by most standards back in the 70's. I imagine they were to 10% in my mill town. Mom and dad had a going insurance business and the dad decided to get out of that and go into the beer business with a partner. His wife, who worked with him in the family insurance business begged him not to.
The old man was a big tough dude but was not cut out for an alcohol related business. He had a law degree from Gonzaga I think and was a WWII veteran. He was with the 25th Infantry "Pacific Lightning" division and saw some of the worst of the fighting on Guadalcanal. They relieved the marines there and had the job of cleaning out the rest of the Japanese on the Island. There he earned the nickname, "Ivan The Terrible".
I ended up working for that beer distributor a few years after he was run out of it and lost everything. The coincidentally met his son and became good friends with him. That's how I know both sides of the story.
For awhile they had it made. The kids grew up rich and lived at the country club. They got taken down big time! They lost their house and ended up living in an apartment. No more country club for them. Their mom hanged herself and their dad found her. she didn't die right away. That took a few days in the hospital before she finally went.
The son has all kinds of issues related to hs dad and the way things went and is bi-polar. His sister was a beautiful woman that any man around here would have died for. She was with a really freaky abusive wealthy man most of the time I knew her. No one could understand why she put up with him. We kind of figured it was her having that home and money, what she had grown up accustomed to. When she left him finally, it wasn't long before she shot herself.
The son actually couldn't be a bigger chip off the ol' block if he tried really. At least as far as his attitude toward women and taxes go. He'll criticize his dad for how he treated his mom but he's exactly the same. His dad was pretty abusive toward his mom, right-winger to the bone always bitching about taxes. Ironically, he came out of it smelling like a rose and was a judge of some kind in Washington state for years. That asshole never even paid his wifes hospital bills over what must have been 40 years. The way his son tells it, he'd pay like $15 bucks a month or whatever the bare minimum was to keep out of trouble.
The son is a master painter and I mean really good! Interiors of nice homes is his specialty and he has the skill to have been retired by now at about 60. He will do anything to fly under the radar and avoid paying taxes though, even if it means working very little and being poor. He worked on the Alaskan pipeline as a young guy and literally had a nervous breakdown over the taxes he had to pay. His dad did that to him. Anyone else would have been jazzed about the money he got to keep!
What the right does to keep upper middle class people on their side I call, "house "n!&&er" syndrome. Like the slave owners would do by giving a slave a little bit better position than the field hands. Keep them in constant fear of being back in the fields. Anything we want to try and do to help poor or lower paid people, has to come right out of their hide!
What we need to do is stop the looting by the 1% and make maybe the top 10% start giving back just a little. What they have stolen from us represents pretty much all of the hole we're in. A guy like me would just like to be able to stop working, drink beer and go fishing some days within 100 miles of where I live for maybe 15 years if I'm lucky. I'd honestly be really happy with that. It looks like just maybe, I might be able to do that and I think I'm lucky. That was an impossible dream for guys just like me 100 years ago and I know the labor movement is the only reason I have a chance at it. Too many people voting Republican don't understand that.
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