But getting back to what I was saying earlier...
The media will never pick on the civil servants I listed and make them the target of your ire. Why? Because we've all got a teacher, or firefighter or cop friend and we've probably listened to them gripe about being underpaid at some point or another. Even if we don't agree with them, we still have a point of reference and if they were targeted by the media, we'd feel some sympathy. On the other hand, if they target a minority group who, let's face it, we don't have a lot of social interaction or mingling with, it's easier to get upset and channel our anger in that direction. It's much easier to heap hate and blame on a people that we aren't close to.
This plays on the human instinct to fear the unknown. We're all afraid of what we don't understand or haven't experienced before. Some of us counter that with bravado, and some of us counter that with anger and indignation, and still others of us cringe from it. Whatever the reaction is, it's natural. Minority groups, especially ones that don't share our customs and language have always been easy targets throughout human history. Whether it's Jews or Gypsies in Europe with their strange customs and religions, or Italian immigrants at the beginning of the last century here in America, the story is always the same. You get a bunch of poor ignorant and angry peasants together, stick an eloquent speaker in front of them, and have yourself a pogrom. There, now instead of directing their anger at the establishment, or that noble who stole the fall's harvest and sold it off to buy himself a new warhorse, they've channeled and redirected that anger elsewhere. They'll blame the greedy Jew or the thieving Gypsies, or the hospital system abusing illegal immigrants.
What the media does is to simply get people angry about an issue, keep feeding their anger, give them a shoulder to cry on, and pray that it doesn't blow up in their face if they're ever found out. It's called hooking an audience. They don't have to be truthful, they don't have to be sincere, they just have to do whatever it takes to sell ratings. Fox happens to have the anger card down pat. MSNBC does the same with indignation. Either way, they all play on emotion in order to keep you from changing that channel.
If you've read all this, take a second and go back and read what my original post was now.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
