Demonizing The Poor

What is it about poor people that makes us so uncomfortable?  Or perhaps, even, outright angry or hostile?  We walk past the homeless person on the street, barely seeing or acknowledging his existence.  We resent the mother in the supermarket paying for her groceries with food stamps.  We object to providing our tax money to fund the welfare check that goes out to the family below “the poverty line.”  We resent our having to work while the government supports the unemployed who are not working.  We take a wide roller brush and paint all welfare recipients as deadbeats living on the dole; people receiving unemployment benefits as lazy bums defrauding the system; the homeless as morally irresponsible who have given up on their responsibilities to society; and gangs of inner-city youths as drug dealers and criminals.

Truth is, there are individuals in each of these groups that fit these stereotypical profiles.  As there are always given individuals that fit any kind of racial, religious, gender, sexual, economic, geographic, or other life-style stereotype.  Just as there are also many individuals in these groups who defy the stereotype, who operate independently of the circumstances that surround them.  The parent working 2-3 jobs who nevertheless still lives below the poverty level.  The inner-city youth going nights to community college to train for a job and thereby have a way out of the gang.  The homeless mother living in her car with her children, trying to hold the family together however possible.  The business professional still sending out resumes, attending job fairs, going in for interviews, who has not given up in spite of depleted savings accounts.  As any social or charity worker can tell us, for every story of fraud and failure, there are other stories of human determination and perseverance, of courage overcoming adversity.

Yet we live comfortably in our painting from our broad brush.  Or we make ourselves comfortable with leaving the reality of poor people to the responsibility of social service and charity workers, thankfully out of our sight.  Where does our blindness come from?  Is it that knowing “there but for the grace of God go I” makes us so insecure?  Does a part of us intuitively know that the fairy tale of our life that we have worked so hard to construct could so easily collapse upon the smallest turn of Life?  Does disparaging “the poor” allow us to mask an underlying prejudice of yet another, far less acceptable kind?  Is it that the arrogance of our success, and the effort we have put into achieving it, makes us forget how “lucky” we in fact have been, and how much help we had in achieving that success?  (Three or four “big star actors” may have drawn us into the movie theater, but the list of “credits” at the end of the movie goes on seemingly continuously.)

We exhort the unemployed to “just get a job,” yet most major corporate employers choose to cut jobs as their first solution to threatened profits.  We tell young people to “get an education,” yet state and local governments are cutting educational funding at every opportunity.  We tell the welfare mother to get out of the house and act responsibly for her children, yet we cut food stamp spending, prevent access to affordable health care insurance, and cut funding for child care support.  We need not reward indolence, but we should not punish acts of responsibility, if not courage.  For all the hard work we may feel we have done to arrive at where we have come, there are many poor who are working as hard in their circumstances just to maintain where they have managed to come.

In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was taped rabble-rousing a millionaire’s gathering about “the 49%” of Americans living on the public dole, expecting to be taken care of by government handout.  It played well to an audience hungry to believe that divisive electioneering.  Only later was the question raised as to WHO these 49% actually are.  And it turned out to include such people as retirees otherwise solely dependent upon their social security to survive.  Children unable to provide for themselves.  Military families struggling with low pay for extraordinary services rendered.  Disabled Americans struggling to get through the day while facing limited access.  Interestingly, the 49% did NOT include, for example, government contractors selling overpriced and/or unneeded products and services in the name of “saving jobs” (i.e. saving profits by corporate welfare); college professors living off of questionable research grants; state/local governments with palms constantly extended pleading for funding awards; or CEOs receiving hidden tax credits for their company’s special benefit (while tax credits for the poor are being cut).

Certainly punish the individual defrauders and abusers with the full force of the legal system.  But let us not slander all of a group for the callous, despicable actions of the individuals.  Lest all of us who are fortunate to live outside of poverty get painted with a similar broad brush.  (Witness the abuse of 300 doctors arrested last year for Medicare fraud and for supplying drug dealers with pills for illegal resale.  Or the financiers and mortgage lenders who defrauded the home-owning public and wiped out significant portions of the American economy.)  We should react to real individual people, not group labels.

Before we demonize the “Medicaid dependent,” let us think about the working poor paid a wage we ourselves would never accept.  Before we demonize the “unemployed bums,” let us think about the desperate breadwinner with the battered self-esteem from countless interview rejections because she is over 50.  Before we demonize the “food stamps recipient,” let us think about the military wife or the senior citizen who cannot afford the inflated grocery prices created by the “big Agri” food producers.  Before we demonize “the welfare mom,” let us think about all the dependent children, older parents, and others who she may be caring for in her home.

Each of the three great Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – exhorts us to look out for “the widow, the orphans, and the poor.”  We all share in that responsibility, and other responsibilities in situations where help is needed.  We meet that responsibility through our individual actions, our religious and charitable affiliations, and – when scale or efficiency deems it appropriate – through the mechanisms of our shared government.  But our actions are preceded and guided by what we think.  So it is by what we think, more than our actions, that we will ultimately be tested and judged.  Hopefully we will not be found as poor in our thoughts as the economically poor we excoriate.

© 2014  Randy Bell                www.ThoughtsFromTheMountain.blogspot.com