The Invisible Middle Class by Melvyn Brown

The Invisible Middle Class by Melvyn Brown

It speaks volumes about the flakiness of politics that leaders and country candidates who most often emerge as winners in elections seldom speak about the Middle Class while campaigning. Their campaigns focus on the rich and the poor.

I have borrowed, bought and browsed through books and magazines on society, the fragile economy,unemployment, unsustainable debt, and how imperiled attempts are being made abroad to stabilize the single European currency. Always, the tone and presentation in all the books I have read and flipped through, were peppered with fillers and features on their nations impact on the rich and the poor.

It was a surprise for the media last week when Pope Francis, after a gruelling trip to Ecuador, Paraguay and Bolivia, acknowledged what one reporter had to say about the middle class. The Vatican always faces challenges to talk sternly, to invoke and revoke, to make threats of discipline, to re-evangelise in the West. Pope Francis had spoken for almost an hour on the defence of the poor, making it a plank of his papacy. The journalist wanted to know why the pontiff had not spoken about the "working, tax-paying" middle class. "You're right. It's an error of mine not to think about this,," the Holy Father said. It was a rare "papal mea culpa". The Pope thanked the reporter for his "good correction".

The overburdened middle class have an eerie mirror designed to ignore their contributions in work and efforts made towards the growth of society. The view from the gallery is a comedy. The middle class pledges, while the rich splurge and the poor benefit to some extent.

The middle class are responsible, have no time to be disillusioned, pay their taxes, work hard, spend on education, luxury, civil renewal and are, in turn, brow-beaten by the system to keep labour unions afloat, and human resource development projects alive - all for the shifting coalitions in politics to comfort the rich and the poor. The equation is : the rich get richer and the poor, poorer.
God bless you and your loved ones.