I have noticed a disturbing trend over the past few months, of friends, co-workers, neighbors, and family--themselves perhaps being a car accident, layoff, or major medical emergency away from financial ruin--showing overt hostility if not outright trashing people who are less fortunate than they are.
It seems like our struggling middle class has been listening far too much to the Eric Cantors of the world and not enough to the, ummm, Jesus Christs of the world, in whom they sometimes profess to follow. If Facebook is an online mirror of our real-life society at large, I worry about our society's future indeed.
More after the Great Orange Squiggly of Satan.
An altruistic, good-hearted coworker and I have tried for several years to get an office community-service project going--even a once-yearly holiday event such as Foster Angels or Toys for Tots collection. We approached our boss, and other co-workers, that this would benefit our company from a public-relations standpoint (getting our company name out there as a business that is invested in the needs of its community in a positive way), and also from a group morale standpoint.
To our disappointment, neither our boss nor our coworkers could be bothered with such an endeavor. What is frustrating is that most of my coworkers are better off financially than I am--they live in McMansions with granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances in gated communities, send their kids to privileged parochial schools, and hang in circles with like-minded 21st-century "yuppies" in the "bubble" who probably ask with Miss USA starry eyes: "Recession? What recession?" Suffice it to say that most are reasonably self-involved and get more anxious about the Casey Anthony trial or who's going to win on The Voice than they ever would about the August 2 debt-ceiling deadline.
When my coworker approached one such upper-middle-class thirtysomething in our group--who lives in one such McMansion and whose stay-at-home wife regularly shuttles her young children to playgroups and photo appointments--he answered curtly, "Why are you bugging me about charities? I've got mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay." When she told me about this encounter, she and I mutually got indignant. She and I have mouths to feed, a mortgage to pay, and student loans and a myriad of other bills, yet we didn't have a problem with ponying up $30 or $40 to get a couple of needy kids a Christmas present. Dismayed, we ended up pitching in just the two of us for four Foster Angels kids and dropping off the gifts ourselves after work. We've made it a yearly ritual between us, because sometimes that is what you have to do when the rest of the team won't pull its weight.
In the months since the 2010 election, I've noticed more of this cold-shoulderedness coming out of people in my family and social circles who are even less well-off than my husband and I are, and that's frankly setting the bar pretty low. I am wondering if the selfishness and short-sightedness that drove voters to the polls in November to pull the lever for Republicans have emboldened these qualities in ordinary Americans to some extent--that a new Republican majority is hindering that evil Socialist Obama's plans to lessen the suffering of their fellow Americans in poverty. The new Ayn Rand deity seems to have replaced Jeebus in all areas of life except for the hot-button social-issues, where somehow people believe that God declared that women should forever remain hostage to their reproductive organs and a right-wing doctrine should be present in all school text books, whatever and ever, amen.
On Facebook recently, a relative of mine who is attending grad school in the Northeast took a screenshot of a TV showing our state's horrid governor Rick Scott signing the bill forcing people on unemployment and welfare to get drug-tested. Under it, she remarked, "Finally, someone listened to my ranting." One of her friends commented, "Oh my god that's awesome! Let's hope a bunch of left wing #!%^*€¥¥s don't mess it up!" I feel I was the lone voice of reason on the entire thread when I replied,
I hate to be a killjoy, but I really don't think this is a great idea. It makes the automatic assumption that people in our state who are poor are these losers who do nothing but sit on their butts and spend their welfare checks on drugs. Sure, there are the losers out there, but they are the exception and not the rule. The economy has been rough as it is in FL (we are one of the hardest-hit states in terms of the real-estate downturn and unemployment); it adds insult to injury when you tell people who honestly can't find a job that they need to get drug-tested because, you know, the Powers That Be simply distrust you as a human being that much...JMNSHO; YMMV.
I feel my reply to this congratulatory lovefest over Scott's signing the drug-testing bill was quite balanced and not hurtful or insulting at all, but it not only invited a series of angry replies, including:
Hey. I am unemployed. I am fine with the drug testing. If my taxes are paying for you to live they should not be paying for you to get drugs. People who need help getting by while they are down are fine. People who are trying to duck the system and get away with being paid for doing nothing, well those people desirve to be tested and fucked when they fail.
They should also have to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
And my cousin replied...
Wow... not that I would like to add to this but my small opinion is very simple: you follow the law, the law will follow you. No judgements, no discrimination.
...before she summarily unfriended me. She would only re-friend me when I promised I wouldn't post anything else political, and let it end there.
More recently, I had a neighbor post a link to this horrifying trend of fast-food restaurants allowing food-stamp recipients to use their food stamps to buy their shit food. IMO, this is horrifying, for reasons the Wallet Pop article to which I link lays out clearly:
Children who are raised in households in which they receive low-quality food are more likely to be poor themselves, in addition to suffering from diet-related diseases and struggling in school.
There's even evidence that high-calorie, low-nutrient-value diets (think sodas, french fries and low-quality proteins like hamburgers and chicken nuggets) contribute to aggressive risk-taking behavior.
All these concerns paint a picture of a sad, endless loop: Low income leads to unstable homes, unfortunate health outcomes and poor nutrition; unstable homes, unfortunate health outcomes and poor nutrition lead to lower incomes. And while we're at it, the circumstances of low income and poor nutrition are related to high debt (from health care bills) and poor success in school and criminal convictions.
It's enough to get food policy activists to call for better options for poor Americans, like better access to fresh food, extra food stamp benefits for use at farmer's markets, and outreach by community gardens to lower-income neighborhoods.
Yeah, what this writer says. However, the reasons this neighbor's other Facebook friends were posting for this food-stamp fast-food travesty were quite different:
Really??????? Free health insurance, free housing, free food, and now taco bell???? Why look for a job I'll head down to the welfare office and apply! Do u know how many tacos and bean burritos I could get with 100$ in food stamps??????WTF!!!!!!
maybe I should quit my job just to get food stamps and free taco bell and KFC
Of course, this elicited me jumping in and posting my take on their reaction--which my neighbor deleted because she thought it would provoke an unkind reaction from the FB friends who posted the above sentiments. I cannot remember the exact verbiage of what I posted, but I did mention that, while I agreed this was a terrible idea, I didn't like the idea of ganging up on the poor and lumping them all into a ball of, "they're all losers who deserve what they get, and I work HARD for my money, damn it!!" I also mentioned that life was hard for all of us, and there are bad people in every socioeconomic class, and even though it might be "easier" to beat up on the powerLESS, we should all be aiming our ire at the powerFUL who are taking our lives away from us. Clearly, this response was so unreadable that my neighbor had to fear retaliation from her "friends."
This prompted a bad argument (both online and offline) between my neighbor and myself, which delved into some personal stuff that I won't get into here. In short, we worked it out with me apologizing (I'm such a Democrat that way, I guess!) and her saying she admired me for my activism, but like a lot of people, she is just caught up in the day-to-day goings-on of her family's life, and doesn't feel like anything she would do would do any good. I suppose that is part and parcel of the hopelessness that a lot of Americans with no power feel, have nothing to do but despair and retreat to the bread and circuses our corporate overlords endow our entertainment world with--that is, when we're not working in a cube and buying the occasional Lottery ticket hoping on a wing and a prayer to escape our misery.
It hurts me that so many Americans feel that way--that they are powerless, and have nothing to do but retreat. It makes me feel so very alone--even from my own family, who themselves would rather not be bothered with it. It hurts me that so many middle-class Americans like me would rather, at best, ignore the plight of the ones hurting even more than we are; or at worst, ridicule them and cheer on the Tea Party, Republicans, and enabling fake "Democrats" in beating up the poor even more. What kind of a society are we if we keep allowing ourselves to do this to each other?
As Ellinoiranne stated magnificently in her recent diary, we cannot afford the compromises that are being made this very week with regards to the further dismantling of our social safety net in the name of austerity, reducing the deficit, and letting those punk-ass "job creators" who haven't done Jack Shit in creating a single job in the past 10 years they've gotten their pet tax cuts.
I would take it one step further and attest that we cannot afford to keep beating each other up and shitting on the poor when the calm before the storm whispers to us that we, too, could one day soon be "them." I am afraid for my Yuppie coworkers and their spouses, who laugh in oblivion about the most banal shit like eating at a Peruvian restaurant for the first time and drinking gourmet beer, and who laugh at the plight of the poor who are forced to piss in cups for unemployment money and eat shit food at Taco Bell--that they may find themselves confronting a reckoning of their own making. It is not wishful thinking on my part--it may soon be a cold reality if we all don't wake up soon.