Oh dear- I hardly know where to start with the misinformation in that post. Let me just say, I don't want to be in the business of looking for these posts- I was hoping that if I made this thread, other people would post them here (which seems to be working out, so far). Going out to find them myself would be too unpleasant for me.
Now back to the post in question- first off, the writer treats Democrats as if they are monolithic. There are many competing values and ideas in the Democratic party (just as there are in the republican party). The party embraces very extreme liberals, as well as more conservative democrats, who simply don't fit within the Republican party.
It might be interesting to talk about the variety of views in the democratic party. I wonder if there are studies which might give us a clue as to which of the political parties embraces the more diverse membership. Wouldn't that be interesting? I think I'll see if there is anything on that.
"People are poor because they are lazy AND ignorant." Now that is an interesting generalization- which might make some people feel better about the presence of poor people in the world. Some people are probably poor because they are lazy and ignorant. Then there are people who are poor because they are of marginal intelligence- since average IQ is 100, we know there are significant numbers of people under 100- and plenty of folks walking around in the 75-85 region. Now I'm not sure how those folks are supposed to become wealthy, or even middle class. No doubt they are often among the working poor.
New immigrants are not lazy, but they may be uneducated in our language. They are poor because they are at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap- and eventually they will work themselves up (we can hope). The gentleman who hang out at Home Depot, looking for work, and who are willing to work at any labor for 7-12 dollars an hour, those gentleman are not lazy, and the two I hired to help me clean my mother's house out, were not ignorant either. They were lovely people. These men were poor- and yet, they were gracious, and polite, and very kind- and one of them was an incredibly devoted father. To hear him talk about his little girl, and how bright she was, and how much fun she was, well, it made me feel privileged to be in his company.
I hope that the person who wrote that post tossed it off thoughtlessly, without really thinking about how many different reasons there are for people to be poor in this country. Serving the various types of poor people, lifting them out of poverty, breaking cycles of poverty where they exist- I don't think there is a more noble goal than that. Democracy is meaningless, where basic needs are not met- and we might try bringing freedom to America, by freeing the poor and the working poor from poverty, before we try freeing anyone else. Now there are bound to be disagreements on just how we lift people up from poverty- but I would hope we would do it humanely, and frame the issue humanely. |
