What, then, is the solution for the poor?
Look. Nobody is entitled to anything, whether good or bad.
I’m going to say it again.
Nobody is entitled to anything. The best we have is the entitlement to “certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
My father was born dirt poor, seventh of the family, to righteous and Godfearing folk. His father was a brilliant inventor who was doublecrossed more than once by his partners and fed his family by working as a stonemason. My father helped his father work hard in the Texas sun, pushing wheelbarrows full of concrete and learning the craft of it all. Dad made it, more than any of the rest of his family: he joined the military, stayed in for thirty years, and makes a nice almost-upper-class living as a database programmer. He’s a fine example of a man who pulled himself up by the bootstraps, who made something from nothing. I am intensely proud of him. He has a lot of intelligence, a lot of drive, and a hell of a lot of luck.
What if he’d been injured in Vietnam, though? What if he’d never married my mother? What if the truck that plowed him over when he was ten (True story. Dad has almost none of his own teeth) crippled him?
It seems to me that these sorts of conservatives have only one answer for the unfortunate: “Make it better yourself.” They give the answer and they turn away. They say “I shouldn’t be forced to pay for your mistakes.” They say “Suck it up. Nobody owes you anything.” And that’s all true.
But what happens afterward? They don’t seem to care. The person disappears, becomes irrelevant, unimportant, another statistic to which they do not belong. There is not even a twinge of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. There is only “You got yourself into the situation, you get yourself out.” And if it was only hard work that could pull someone out of poverty and into a three bedroom house in a nice suburb, I might agree, but when the deck is stacked so steeply against you, when you’re starting from further down the cliff than the person telling you this, when things come easier when you have money and connections, it’s a bullshit answer.
What to do for the illiterate, Spanish-speaking illegal immigrant mother who gets sick and can’t keep working as a housekeeper? What to do for the man crippled by lax safety standards who does not have the education or understanding to apply for worker’s compensation? What to do for the abused children who take their frustrations out on all the people who seem to have it so much better, stealing cars and breaking windows and catching a few stolen moments with their drug of choice, be it alcohol or pot or sex? What to do with their pregnant girlfriends? Should you just shrug and say it’s not your problem and you shouldn’t be forced to deal with it because you made the right decisions?
Denying responsibility for the problem does not make it go away.
You can walk away, but they will still be behind you. Saying “It’s not my problem” is about as pointless as looking at a broken-down car and saying “Hmm. It shouldn’t be smoking like that.”
This is what pisses me the hell off about the economic crisis. Millions of people in the US are too poor to afford health care or decent food or decent housing in a neighborhood where their kids aren’t in danger of being shot, but this isn’t a crisis. Suddenly a few very rich people are in danger of becoming very poor because of dishonest business practices and it’s time to save them from the poorhouse? Their downfall was inevitable and they knew it, but they milked the system for all it was worth and escaped with platinum damned parachutes. Their actions caused a crisis, but there will be poor always, so they can get fucked. If you look away, you don’t have to see them. If you don’t walk in that part of town, you’re much safer. Just avoid trouble.
