The Rich List

Again, pardon my politics. Few issues upset me more than class disparity. It is one of America's most glaring problems, and it is also the one we seem to care the least about - at least in terms of actually doing something about. All the time on the news you hear people complain about class inequality in other words. You always he about the "average American" who is "strapped for cash" and "just barely making ends meet" you are supposed to feel sorry for these people, and to want to change the world to be more fair to them. But then you see TV, where almost everyone is rich, drives fancy cars, and live in mansions. The high visibility of rich people on television creates the false connotation that the middle-class is a suburbanite who lives in a 2 story house. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. These people likely make up the top 20% of our Nation's incomes

The cash-strapped American as portrayed on television is actually the "middle-class" American. We never see the real poor people in America on television, atleast not portrayed in any way other than criminal scum. Why? Probably because the poorest Americans tend to be minorities, and television doesn't like to portray minorities in a positive light.  George Gerbner's "Mean World" theory shows us that as the media increasingly portrays violence, typically in news broadcasts depicting minorities in poor neighborhoods committting crimes, society as a whole becomes more and more afraid that the world is a violent place. And because this violence is attributed to minorities in the media, we come to blame the minorities. Thus society as a whole tends to shy away from helping out the poorest of the poor. We are raised to believe that these people are "criminal", "unhelpable" or worse that they "deserve what they have". It is easier for people to ignore the problem, and continue incarcerating more and more people than to confront the problem that is facing them. Class disparity can easily be lessened through social and fiscal programs that benefit the poor instead of making the rich richer, but we all know what happened the last time I mentioned socialism, so I wont go into that!