Some time ago I posted an article called Cognitive Dissonance. It put me in mind of something that frustrates me. I’m where I am in life and perhaps you are where you are as a result of forces in this country that created what we think of as the ‘great middle class’. You know these people; they live next door and down the street. You see them at the grocery store, at the gas station, in church and on the way to and from work.

A signficant accomplishment of these United States over the past sixty plus years is the creation of a middle class throughout the emerging world. In 1950 I travelled with my parents to India. We were there for two years, a result of the Marshall Plan, an effort by the US to help rebuild infrastructure in Europe but eventually extended to other parts of the world following WWII.

The Indian government had been give $15M to purchase road building equipment from US manufacturers. Some of you will recognize this as stimulus money. My father, an employee of Caterpillar Tractor Co., was sent to India to help build maintenance and training facilities associated with the tractors, engines, road graders, etc. that had been purchased with the money.

As seen though the eyes of a 9 year old child, India was a strange yet wonderful place. Arriving in what was then Bombay in the middle of the night, the taxi took us to our hotel along streets that were filled with strange lumps. Hundreds of them, everywhere you looked. In doorways, on the sidewalk, in the gutters. The strange, largely unpleasant odors were pervasive and unavoidable.

Turns out the lumps were people sleeping, wherever there was a spot. Unwashed, largely unfed, with whatever possessions they had either on their backs or on their hands. Needless to say, life expectancy was not very high.

My point here is that at the time, India, like virtually every nation outside the “developed world” was a nation of Haves and Have-Nots. Today, India is a country with a thriving middle class, and the discrepancy between the Haves and the Have-Nots is shrinking. There will always be the classic ‘poor’ and the classic ‘royalty’ but the majority will be in a thriving and economically viable middle class.

For all our faults as a nation, the US has managed to export the ability of nations to develop and empower a middle class. We’ve done this successfully for several decades now and as that middle class evolves and grows across the world, our relative influence diminishes. This perceived dimunition of ‘power’ drives some people crazy.

For some time, as this country becomes more polarized politically, there is a growing fear on my part that at some point, my children/grandchildren are going to be faced with social chaos if we allow our middle class to shrink. If there is too large a discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots, then social chaos will result.

A major force moving us in this direction is the naivite of some in today’s middle class, particulary among Republicans, thinking they are among the elite and threatened by the have-nots. Financially, they are already among the have-nots and are pushing themselves further away from the haves with their rhetoric and willingness to embrace those who would shrink from taxing the haves appropriately.

Today I ran across a post suggesting that the Occupy Wall Street crowd was simply a reflection of lazy people with nothing else to do. I suggest it’s our version of the Arab Spring, and if you are not paying attention, things could get ugly. There’s an increasing perception that our middle class is getting the shaft, that hard work and attention to detail doesn’t make a lot of difference.

Every society will have poor people, those who for whatever reason, legitimate or otherwise, don’t have or have lost the skill sets necessary to move upward into the middle class. However, if the middle class allows that demographic to become unsustainably large, the middle class will no longer be the middle class, and will be at the mercy of those at the top.

If you think those at the top have your best interests at heart, think again.