I was watching the classic “Les Miserables” based on the Victor Hugo novel and I thought about the main concept of having compassion for the plight of the poor.
I think nowadays in the US we have less compassion for the poor. We see them as lazy or not wanting to work. It doesnt help that in Victor Hugo’s day the “poor” were crying out just for basic food, shelter, and clothing while today we see the poor asking for Iphones.
I feel for the poor because I know what its like to be unemployed/underemployed and wondering how I’m going to pay the bills. I wish so much that we had more better paying jobs because your WalMarts and McDonalds type jobs just dont cut it.
I know people who are way into Les Miserables because they have sophisticated tastes and left-wing sensibilities but at the same time “don’t believe in handouts”. Go figure.
I think a lot of people in the US still have this idea that it is the land of opportunity, so all it takes is hard work to get ahead. Ergo, if you are not getting ahead, you just aren’t working hard enough. People don’t understand the barriers to upward mobility. I read an interesting column in Slate a few months ago–for someone in the middle class, an unexpected expense of a few hundred dollars is a nuisance; for the working poor, it can mean a disastrous cascade of lost car, apartment, job, etc. But again, people who are well-off (especially people who have always been well-off) fundamentally don’t understand these facts.
OK, fair enough. At the same time people who breed children like it was a hobby don’t understand they are the reason for generational/exponential poverty.
If you can’t afford 1 child then don’t have 5. We ask the rich to give but somehow it’s taboo to make people accountable for their actions.
Ok, well, I have NO children, a college degree, and 30 years experience working in corporate America at well above minimum wage. Yet I wound up poor. Do I qualify for sympathy or do I belong on the trash heap with the rest of the dregs? Oh, and I have no desire for an iPhone but based on the number of people expressing exasperation with me for not having a texting-capable communication device I’m not sure that desire is entirely internally driven in people.
Please stop characterizing the poor as having masses of children, overweight, spendthrift, and all the other stereotypes. Such stereotypes are one of the reasons the poor are despised in our society. Yes I used the d-word, because it’s not a matter of having less compassion, there is open hostility towards those on the bottom of social heap.
If you’ve ever worked in fast food, then it’s no mystery to you why a lot of people are poor. The stereotype exists because we’ve all seen it, and because most of us didn’t start out with a silver spoon in our mouths.
It’s not right to hate the poor as a bunch of slackers, but it’s equally as stupid to think they are all just unfortunates who we could end up like through bad luck. Every person’s situation is different. And it’s quite possible for Americans to dislike the lazy and ignorant while having compassion for the unfortunate and downtrodden. Believe it or not, most of us can see the complexities of the world. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
I really have passion for the working poor. those people working at a McJob, or 2, and those just dont pay squat. Also those who have had major medical or financial problems. Losing a good job can send a family into a spiral.
I know the day of good paying factory jobs is long gone. Thats why we need jobs at places like fast food and retail to start paying better wages. Also we need a national insurance program.
Compassion for the poor is more of an anomaly. Even back in the 19th C. They were divided into the “worthy poor,” (usually the agrarian poor who were starving in Wordsworthian natural settings) and the urban poor who’d escaped all that bucolic splendor to find work in the mills. They drank and rutted and gambled. No pity for them. The same Industrial Revolution that created them also created a bourgeois middle class, which created the myth that if some could make it, anyone could.
Occasionally the scales of popular opinion would briefly tilt in the favor of the poor. The reactionaries in power would massacre the slums and Victor Hugo & Daumier would be briefly fashionable. In 1939 everyone suddenly experience poverty and it wasn’t their own fault!, and the popular movie was I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. 65 five years later, that same theme would be explored much differently on America’s Most Wanted.
The problem is that “lazy slacker” is the default assumption and the poor person has to prove they’re not such prior to experiencing compassion. I do not like being called a lazy slacker bitch (and worse) because I have a low income, yet it happens.
I agree, many can see the nuances. The problem is, the loud assholes who have the ability to make a worker drone’s life absolutely miserable because their in a job where they are required to smile and be nice no matter what abuse is heaped on them.
It would not bother me in the least if the fast food industry died - well, I’d feel really bad for all the people left unemployed by that, to be honest, but the industry itself I can and largely do live without.
Myself, I never assume lazy slacker unless the person demonstrates intense slacking.
Of course, slacking isn’t the only negative attribute that can make you poor. A lot of poor folks have personal demons which interfere with their ability to function well enough to make a living. It’s not necessarily their fault in many cases, but there are no real solutions to that kind of problem either.
BTW, I run along a suburban trail frequently, along several underpasses. I never thought about the jagged boulders (technically mine tailings) on their banks, supposing they were some sort of ballast or that they just erupted the same way Oscar Madison thought gravy just came with the roast.
Then I read they’re placed there at extra trouble and expense to keep the homeless away, taking the irony out of Anatole France’s quip “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges”
This makes no sense. Those companies give people with low skills and/or low experience a job. If companies like those were banned, we may only be left with employers that require more qualifications. Banning your McDonalds and Walmarts would be the worst thing possible for the poor. It would also eliminate low cost products, which the poor rely on.
Sometimes middle class folks see their own preferences as beneficial to the poor when they are actually just self-serving. That kind of thinking is what produced gentrification in the big cities.
Based on what? Low wage labor is just a small part of running a business.
As to the OP, yeah we disdain the poor in America. As well as minorities. The fact that the powers that be have been so successful in weaving and building cultural/racial/economic divisions in this country is why our social safety net is so poor. Any attempt to make it better is seen by those who consider themselves the morally superior backbone of the country as rewarding ‘those people’. I have no idea how this generation of kids is supposed to deal with the lack of jobs, expensive education, unaffordable health care, etc.
You know, living here on the bottom I see how a lot of this interweaves - like some of my coworkers who are obese due to difficulty in exercising, due to untreated medical problems, which are untreated due to lack of medical insurance (a situation that may or may not be improving).
If I had not had resources I acquired when I had enough money to be middle-class I’d be so much worse off than I am now. Unfortunately, some of those resources are starting to wear out. I’m really sick of the constant struggle, worry, and lack of resources.
As an example - my spouse started a small business and had customers, wonderful ideas, things to sell… but we’re now at a stand-still because we lack the resources to purchase the raw materials we need to produce something sellable. It’s really hard for the middle-class who have never been genuinely poor to understand just how critical it is we budget to the penny, how we just can’t pull $20 out of our ass to purchase something because our money really is that tight.
Individually, we mostly have some sympathy for the poor. But the people who have bought and paid for congress do not. Fox network does not, being basically in the pay of the same people. So far too many people disdain the poor en masse.
Incidentally, I have read that if MacD paid their workers $15 an hour it might add a dime to the cost of your burger. I don’t know if this is true. I do know that Costco pays their workers a lot more than Walmart and I like to shop in Costco where the workers are cheerful. People tell me (I have never been in one) that it is not like that at Walmart.
On the one hand, the Republicans blame the unemployed and claim that the welfare kings (and queens) are that way because they like that life. But any proposal they don’t like is inevitably described as “job-killing” (which is often false) that suggests that they really know that what the poor crave mainly is jobs.
I recently read that deductability of mortgage interest for the top 20% of taxpayers costs the government four times as much as the government actually spends on housing for the bottom 20%. This is an odd statistic, but I mention this in passing. What I do know is the homeowners are not paying taxes on their “rent” while renters are paying rent from after-tax income. In other words, if you buy a house for, say, a million dollars, that million dollars is invested in your house and pays your rent, but the income that that million dollars earns is untaxed. Because of deductiability of mortgage interest, this works out to be same if you borrow most or all of that million dollars. This point was made perfectly clear when a good friend of mine who lives in central Massachusetts traded his house during a sabbatical year with a guy from Colorado who was coming to Mass for his sabbatical. No money changed hands, none at all. Years later, a tax accountant told him that they should each have declared the fair rental value of their houses as income for that year. Thus renters are subsidizing home-owners.
