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" Central to our politics \u2014 and, indeed, central to our lives these days \u2014 is the steady ongoing effort to get America accustomed to the habits of oligarchy, to make the general public react to certain stories of class-based outrage with, at best, exhausted resignation that eliminates from the start any thought of expending real energy to correct the problem at hand. The outright brigandage of what happened on Wall Street \u2014 and the remarkable ability of the brigands to escape any real punishment for what they did \u2014 is only the most obvious example. Two stories popped up in the last couple of days that illustrate perfectly what happens when a putatively democratic society gives itself over to the notion that things simply are the way they are, and that the boss is always the boss, and that the problems of our fellow struggling citizens are none of our concerns, all of which are the most basic habits of oligarchy that there are. The first story comes from Long Island. A woman named Deborah Stevens donated a kidney as part of an effort to get a kidney for her boss at an auto dealership. What Stevens says happened next sounds like something out of Dickens: Stevens returned to work four weeks later \u2014 even before Brucia. Three days after coming back Stevens says she didn&amp;#039;t feel well. &amp;quot;No sooner when I got through the door at my house, the phone rang and it was her, saying - &amp;#039;What are you doing? Why are you home,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Stevens said. &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;#039;Jackie, I don&amp;#039;t feel well.&amp;#039; And she said, &amp;#039;Well you can&amp;#039;t just come and go as you please. People are going to think you&amp;#039;re getting special treatment.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Stevens said she had complications from the surgery, like nerve damage in her leg. But she said, the yelling didn&amp;#039;t stop. &amp;quot;And she told me, it sounds like a personal problem and she wasn&amp;#039;t interested,&amp;quot; Stevens said. &amp;quot;And I said, well it&amp;#039;s a personal problem because it&amp;#039;s surgery. I&amp;#039;ve never had a kidney removed. And she said, &amp;#039;Oh, are you throwing this up in my face?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; When she hired a lawyer, Stevens was given a different job at another dealership 50 miles away, before being fired. Without passing judgment one way or the other on the merits of Stevens&amp;#039;s lawsuit, that paragraph is lousy with exactly the kind of employer-employee jargon that has filtered into almost every American workplace. The health of the employee is a &amp;quot;personal issue,&amp;quot; as calculated by the beancounters in Human Resources, and the employee becomes accustomed to a culture of subordination enforced with chilly efficiency. The employee is a cog, nothing more. Then, in Georgia, some people tried to move into a house they&amp;#039;d already bought. They wound up in jail: But when Jean Kalonji and his wife, Angelica, started working at the home, an armed man and another person who appeared to be the man&amp;#039;s son allegedly confronted them. &amp;quot;He say to put the hands up and get out from the house, otherwise he would shoot us,&amp;quot; the husband told Channel 2. The neighbors didn&amp;#039;t believe the couple when they told them they had bought the home and called the Newton County Sheriff&amp;#039;s Office. The Kalonjis didn&amp;#039;t have the closing papers with them, so deputies arrested them, charged them with loitering and prowling and took them to jail. This is how oligarchy works, too. It plays upon the fears and insecurity of ordinary people, and that causes those people to search out situations in which they can be the boss. (And, yes, this being America, race is a neat little shortcut in this regard.) This, of course, is something that benefits the actual oligarchs; as long as the people who know their place are fighting over whose place it actually is, those people won&amp;#039;t be wondering why they should be assigned a &amp;quot;place&amp;quot; anyway. Soon, that squabbling \u2014 and, often, something much worse \u2014 becomes habitual, too. This blog has been a little monomaniacal on the subject of a political commonwealth recently, and that&amp;#039;s only because a political commonwealth is the only vehicle we have to break out of the habits of oligarchy. We have to stop dreaming of wealth. We have to stop behaving as though a self-governing republic should operate on the same principles as a state lottery, where its benefits come to us only by blind chance. We have to start seeing each other in Deborah Stevens. We have to start seeing ourselves in the Kalonjis, and not calling the cops on them. We have to look beyond simply putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day and start thinking about why that effort is getting harder and harder. We are all we have left. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13805/two-americas-8334941/>