Q, you've never really been poor, have you?
I don't think anyone who has been dismally poor, out of work poor, can't pay the rent poor, can't pay for medical care for their children poor, can't buy healthy food poor and can't properly clothe their kids poor, could write what you wrote with such apparent confidence and disdain.
I lived on the periphery of that when I was a kid and there were a lot of other people living like that around us...planks on the floors that showed the dirt under the floor boards, out house toilettes, poached deer for food, clothes that made you stand out from the other kids at school, not playing sports because the medical physicals or the cleats cost too much. And our families weren't all "lazy," some of them were just caught in the fissures when the economy shifted and their jobs fell into the void.
That's happening now and it's happening on a huge scale.
The mantra that "people will do what they have to to earn a living, the illegals do" might be correct but what it seems to miss is any sense of the human toil involved and that for some people the "do what they have to" means going on welfare, food stamps, begging, stealing and giving up hope.
Maybe the lack of empathy some conservative seem to suffer is a result of internalizing the image of a straw man, Pepsi drinking, boozing, fat, cigarette smoking, freeloading recipient laughing at the system but in the real world, and especially in today's real world, there are a lot of people who don't fit that caricature.
And, by the way, I've done work in strawberry fields as a teenager and it's not all picking berries before noon. There's hoeing the rows and it's back breaking work where every hour standing and stooping in the heat is a torment. At the end of a grueling 8 or 10 hour day you will have earned enough to pay for a tank of gas and for food for 4 for the day, but not much more and certainly not enough to pay for day care for your kids.
It's not my life now, but I can certainly feel their pain. Can you? Ed |
