The first place I ever encountered the phrase “class consciousness” was in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Of course. “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta.” Everyone in that book is conditioned to be happy with where they are and what they have. In the real world, you meet a lot of discontent people. Some of them seem to achieve everything with little effort but never feel like they’ve acquired enough. Some of them seem to throw themselves full throttle into their own survival and barely earn enough to subsist.

And then, because we aren’t conditioned to like where we are, but rather to believe that we deserve to go further, and can if we just put our backs into it, sometimes the masses notice that all their hard work only enriches those who have more and do less, and then they rise up against their oppressors in class warfare. That’s the theory, anyway.

In my imagination, all 4 panels should have been a contiguous street scene where the management lady interacted with the hourly laborer in front of a building where the disabled veteran sat and the limousine was parked, but my art-fu has not advanced that far. Perspective is like a foreign language to me.

Merry Christmas. It’s not my holiday, and I don’t understand it, but it seems like an especially depressing proposition this year.