The Real Lunch Bucket Democrats

[TML]

So who are the real Lunch Bucket Democrats? It's not the top twenty Clinton donors that threatened Howard Dean to go against the will of the Democratic party. It's you and I. We are the ones who tote our lunches to work, punch a time clock, and work our fingers to the bone while our bosses continue to find ways to strip away our compensation, our benefits, and in some cases our hopes and dreams. If you ask some of us how the past eight years have gone, we'd be more than happy to tell you we're bitter about a lot of things in this country.

For example, we don't know what it's like to pay $2,300 for a concert ticket. We're too busy trying to come up with that kind of money to pay the insurance deductible, and that's assuming we're lucky enough to have health insurance in the first place. We're thankful when people like The Dave Matthews Band are willing to perform within our budget.

We don't know what it's like to give thousands of dollars to the DNCC so we can pull Howard Dean's chain when we don't agree with how our election's going. Instead, we're stuck with that sick feeling in our stomachs when our ballot is scanned through a Diebold machine every November without a paper trail.

We don't know what it's like to get a break from paying taxes on stock dividends. Most of us consider ourselves fortunate if we're in a position to put away 2% in a 401k, let alone a savings account.

We don't know what it's like to own nine homes. If we're stupid enough to take on one of those risky ARM mortgages plus a second mortgage, we'll own one house. That is, until the loan resets two years later and we get a foreclosure notice because we can't refinance due to falling home values.

We don't know what it's like to cheerlead an invasion of another country without personally knowing someone fighting it. In fact, some of us might be in Iraq fighting this war because economic and employment conditions are so bad where we live it's our only ticket out of the small towns we grew up in.

We don't know what it's like to get a healthy bonus at the end of the year Christmas party. We expect layoff notices anytime after January 1st, or news that we're losing our benefits and commission to keep stockholders happy.

We don't know what it's like to meet our friends at the bar after work for a shot of Crown Royal and a beer. At five o'clock every weekday, many of us are rushing through traffic to get to our second low-paying job on time.

We don't know what it's like to dine at a fancy restaurant and write it off as a business expense. Some of us pack a cup of Top Ramen in our lunch buckets because we like the taste of picante chicken and soggy noodles, while others do so because at eight for a dollar it was all we could afford the last time we went grocery shopping.

So what kind of people can throw around money like it's printed for free at Kinko's? They're not Lunch Bucket Democrats. They're Caviar & Cristal Democrats. That's the kind of lifestyle these people are accustomed to. They don't need to pack their own lunch before they go to work. They make enough money to have their lunches catered to them, and it's time we start calling bullshit on the "common" folk who call people like you and I "elitists".