Sentient sack of warm rotten zoo garbage Paul Ryan recently said that what makes America great is the fact that "
the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life." In essence, he was reaffirming the American Dreams. The only problem is, that notion, like everything that weaselly slime sponge says, is bullshit.
The reality in present-day America is that where you are born and raised determines your success to a scary degree.
I know, Paul. It's very sad.
The American Dream was never meant for everybody. Our Constitution and legal documents all have language that seems inclusive and representative of the highest ideals of equality, but the reality has always been something different.
Actually, contrary to what I just said, even
our legal documents often make exclusivity and bigotry very explicit. It's kind of our thing as a nation.
Race and gender have long played roles in who has access to the American Dream, and they still do. But the problem is not just unequal access: the problem is that the very idea of the American Dream is simply illegitimate. The fact is, we are born into a certain class,
and we are more than likely going to remain in that class.
This triumvirate of class, gender, and race discrimination is America's dirty, open secret. In general, race and gender discrimination is frowned upon in respectable company. It still happens,
as recent events prove, but most Americans know that open bigotry is unacceptable. (I hope?) Our president and the worst of his supporters are doing their best to change that and bring it back out in the open,
but there seems to be enough of a pushback to stem the tide of outright hate. (I really hope?)
Poverty, on the other hand, is still something that "respectable" Americans can openly hate, or at least ridicule. Not poverty itself, mind you; people generally don't criticize or address the systems of inequity that create poverty. No, they criticize and often hate the people affected by poverty.
Many consider being poor a personal failing instead of an institutional or social failing. The notion that America is a meritocracy is deeply ingrained in our culture.
This myth perpetuates the idea that our circumstances are a direct reflection of our work ethic. Most financially stable people feel that they deserve to be in the position they are, that they earned their status as wealthy or middle class. Therefore, they believe that anyone in the lower class also deserves their status. Our society links poverty with laziness: poor people simply don't work hard enough. We need to believe that our own success is deserved and not simply luck.
Don't get me wrong, many wealthy people work hard for their success, but luck and circumstance always play a part, as does inheritance.
Wealthy people ensure that their children are wealthy. If you're born into a poor family,
or even just born in a poor neighborhood, you are most likely going to remain poor (and of course,
America's history of redlining also ensured that black people were more likely to live in poor neighborhoods despite their financial status). Our environment is a much bigger determining factor in our financial status than intelligence, work ethic, or anything else, which is a scary thought to people who build their identity on this idea that they earned everything on their own.
It is true that some poor people are lazy. Just as some rich people are lazy. I'd wager that overall, most poor people work harder than most rich people. There's a lot less leisure time, that's for sure, and
being poor is definitely more expensive.
Despite the popular belief that we can just "pull up our boot straps," work hard, and succeed, that ol' American Dream of upward mobility is mostly dead: “
The probability of ending where you start has gone up, and the probability of moving up from where you start has gone down.” That's true even for people with a college degree. Working hard and going to school does't necessarily improve your circumstances in America.
So what's the solution? Well, for many, the solution seems to be shitting on anybody in a worse situation to feel better about themselves.
Look at some of the reactions to the flooding in Texas. "Why didn't they just evacuate?" Well, besides the fact that Houston traffic is an absolute mess on its best days, and the fact that more people died in
the evacuation during Hurricane Rita in 2005 than in the hurricane itself, a lot of these people
simply can not pack up and go. They might not have a car. Or money for gas. Or money for a hotel. Or family anywhere in driving distance. Etc. But yes, blame them for trying to endure a horrific crisis.
It gets worse. Remember bum fights? Those were the wildly popular videos that featured...bums fighting. Literally, homeless men were given spare change or alcohol to fight other homeless men on film. Millions of these videos were sold. Yeah, they didn't even have Youtube yet, where any deprived video can get upwards of a million views. People actually bought physical copies, brought them home, put them in their dvd player, and watched homeless men fighting over Old English malt liquor.
America views the poor as playthings.
They exist for amusement. It's nothing new, though. From 1955 to 1964,
a show called Queen for a Day was a big hit on NBC. This was a game show that featured working class mothers competing against each other for worst life story. One mother needed a wheelchair for her son, another needed home repairs after her husband killed himself. The crowd would cheer for the saddest story, and that person got what they needed. Problems solved. How uplifting!
Most people say they want others to do well and they'll even cheer for the woman winning the wheelchair, but they'll be quick to condemn the woman if she still has financial problems afterwards. Why can't she get her life together already? She got a free wheelchair!
Most people don't really understand poverty. It's more than simply not having money for an item here and there. It's a long-term physical condition that has real,
measured negative effects on mental health. Poverty is even
associated with higher rates of dementia. The struggle is really real.
This misunderstanding or lack of understanding makes people look past the systems of inequity and blame individuals for their inability to escape poverty. That mentality allows the government to cut social welfare programs, remove protections for workers, and keep wages almost criminally low. Republicans are much more open about their contempt for the poor (they have been pushing the "bootstraps" propaganda for decades and attempting to cut any programs that even marginally help the poor) but it goes both ways. Mainstream Democrats have ridiculed the "
pie in the sky" ideas of
universal healthcare and free college, and they are
complicit in cutting welfare programs as well.
There is a great contempt for the poor in this country. Not many recognize their own privilege; they think that if other people simply
tried harder or pulled up their pants or SOMETHING they would be more successful. They fail to take into account how many of the people on food stamps and welfare are children and literally have no choice.
The 8 richest men in the world have more money than 3.6 billion people combined, yet a single mother gets more disdain for using her EBT card to buy food. Our economic system has created an ever expanding chasm between the rich and poor.
Over a million Americans make $2 a day. The average CEO in America
made $11 million last year, almost a 10% raise from the previous year. When was the last time you got a 10% raise in a year?
This contempt for the poor runs deep, and it cuts across race, gender, and political party. I can't count how many times I've heard or seen self-described "liberals" complain about people using food stamps for seafood or some other food item that doesn't meet their own idea of what poor people "should" eat. Poor people can't eat shrimp? Bullshit. Besides, it doesn't matter what they buy, people will find a way to hate on them. They'll get dirty looks for buying steak, but when they buy fast food they get condemned for not eating healthy.
There's a ridiculous, and dangerous, stigma against state aid. The majority of people who are against it have never had to rely on it (although, remarkably,
some who have benefited from social welfare programs argue against them once they are back on their feet). Too many people think that if they managed fine without aid, everyone else should be able to as well. Of course, most of these people are born into a safety net that poor people couldn’t even imagine. The privileged don’t see their own privilege.
They may have inherited their family’s business but they'll argue that they had to work to keep the business. If you just worked harder maybe you would have inherited a business, too!
Many people will never experience poverty, or even meet people who have experienced it, so they have no real concept of it. They hear about the “Welfare Queen” who’s living large off government aid (
but doesn’t actually exist) and they imagine swarms of people eating gourmet dinners on marble tables in front of 60 inch 3-D tvs. All bought with
your hard earned tax dollars! Or they see a poor person with a smartphone and they post a photo on Facebook with a long-winded rant about how people shouldn’t have a smartphone if they don’t have a job. This of course neglects how many people on food stamps do in fact have jobs. Not to mention the fact that in 2017 you need a smartphone (or another way to access the internet) to get a job.
Yet again, these same people who demonize the poor won’t blink an eye when an insurance CEO gets a $100 million check after resigning in disgrace, or when an entire industry gets a government bailout.
It's hard to see the big picture, but it's important to at least try. Instead of getting mad at individuals for being on public assistance, maybe get mad at the corporations keeping people on public assistance. Or get mad at the military industrial complex,
which loses trillions of dollars and simply shrugs its shoulders then asks for trillions more.
But let's just stick to the corporations for now, specifically everybody's favorite corporation to bash publicly and use privately: Walmart. They run a nationwide food stamp scam.
They lobby hard for the SNAP program, then pay their employees as little as possible (making it so they need public assistance to survive even though they work 30-40 hours a week) all while taking advantage of loopholes to avoid taxes. To cap it all off, they accept food stamps at their stores (
taking in $14 billion in just one year) and encourage their employees to shop there.
Walmart's majority owners are worth $149 billion. They could single-handedly end hunger in America. Get mad at them.
The system is so fucked up for the poor and working class that it's often more financially responsible to get public assistance than work full time. Of course, Tomi and Glenn will yell "get a job!" at poor people on state aid, yet when they do get a job and demand fair wages, the same assholes shout "you don't deserve that much!"
All workers deserve a livable wage. There's been a somewhat successful push for a national minimum wage of $15 lately, largely led by fast food workers. The service industry employs 30% of American workers (
up from 13% in the last 60 years). With the continued trend towards automation, a lot more people are going to be forced into these low paying jobs. Unfortunately, the prevailing consensus around the country seems to be: "fuck those fast food assholes for trying to make a livable wage!"
People in other fields think they should be doing better themselves, so why should fast food workers, the lowest of the low, get more? Well, chances are, if you are an employee anywhere (and not the CEO) you should be getting paid more, too! Income equality in the US is at the
highest level since 1928. (Why yes, that is the year before the Great Depression started, thanks for asking.) Instead of knocking fast food and service workers, the largest growing sector in America, why aren't we looking to increase everybody's wages? Yes, teachers and EMTs should make more than fast food workers. So fight for it! Don't knock others for fighting for their worth. It helps us all when more people do better.
Fast food workers are the factory workers of yesteryear; there are still some 17 year old knuckleheads flipping burgers for beer money, sure,
but its mostly adults supporting families. It's still one of the few jobs anyone can get. These workers used to be middle class. They, we, deserve the same livable wages middle class workers once made. Yet wages have not nearly kept up with the cost of living or inflation or CEO pay.
St Louis workers recently voted to raise the minimum wage, but then the state of
Missouri capped the minimum wage at $7.70 (and
its not the only state to do so). That's almost as low as the federal minimum wage, which hasn't been raised in 10 years. Thanks Obama?
Almost a quarter of minimum wage workers in 2014 were over 40 years old, (an increase of 40% from 20 years ago) yet people still imagine all minimum wage workers as pimply teenagers. More than half support themselves; they are not still living with mommy and daddy. They'd deserve better wages even if they did!
Sadly,
the wage chasm in this country will probably just get worse. And employers will
continue to literally rob workers of their labor. I don't know the answer to these issues by any means, but I know that we have to at least understand how this system negatively affects us all. Trickle down economics does not work. It never has and never will. Workers are the foundation of an economy; when they are treated well, all of society benefits.
And when we take care of the most oppressed, the most marginalized, the most vulnerable among us, we move closer to becoming the society that we have always pretended to be.
I Love You All...Class Dismissed.
