![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If you don’t want to read about these two things, scroll on.
The thing that I kept thinking about the post I mentioned last night is how listing examples of what it’s like to be poor in America served to enrage some of the (conservative) people who responded – they objected, it appeared, to even talking about why it sucks to be poor. That is, poor people have only themselves to blame, and describing what it is that they might blame themselves for might lead to support for liberal causes.
I want to bracket for the moment the idea that poverty is an individual fault. What’s curious to me is the idea that describing the consequences of fault obscures responsibility for that fault.
Presumably, conservatives of this type want poverty to suck; otherwise there wouldn’t be an incentive to not be poor. So what’s wrong (or inherently liberal) about describing that suckiness? There are a number of circumstances in which listing examples of “why X sucks” is not supposed to elicit sympathy or a desire for broad-based social change. Scared Straight and other programs that expose students to horrific descriptions of what prison is like are not assumed to create prison reformers. Rather, the operating theory is that people who know what prison is really like will take steps to keep themselves out of it. Likewise, conservative Hell Houses showing the horrible fates of abortionists and gays are designed to use suckiness as aversion therapy.
The reason that describing the suckiness of poverty comes across as inherently liberal and thus threatening to conservative views, I think, is that so many of the incidents described revolve around children. No matter how plucky and self-reliant a 2-year-old is, she isn’t going to get anywhere without help. Sure, in 15 or 7 or however many years it takes until she’s old enough to work for a living according to your philosophy, she can give it a try, but right now she is stuck and no choice she makes will change whether she is poor. In the comments to the poverty post, the conservative objectors talked a lot about the poor judgment of poor people in having children, but not at all about the poor judgment of poor people in being children. (And I’m not even talking about the guy near the end of the second page who has some bizarre fixation with “crack whores pumping out children,” as if that population could explain the millions of uninsured and hungry kids in this country; if you seriously advocate mandatory sterilization for people you describe as worthless, does Godwin’s law apply?)
The thing that I kept thinking about the post I mentioned last night is how listing examples of what it’s like to be poor in America served to enrage some of the (conservative) people who responded – they objected, it appeared, to even talking about why it sucks to be poor. That is, poor people have only themselves to blame, and describing what it is that they might blame themselves for might lead to support for liberal causes.
I want to bracket for the moment the idea that poverty is an individual fault. What’s curious to me is the idea that describing the consequences of fault obscures responsibility for that fault.
Presumably, conservatives of this type want poverty to suck; otherwise there wouldn’t be an incentive to not be poor. So what’s wrong (or inherently liberal) about describing that suckiness? There are a number of circumstances in which listing examples of “why X sucks” is not supposed to elicit sympathy or a desire for broad-based social change. Scared Straight and other programs that expose students to horrific descriptions of what prison is like are not assumed to create prison reformers. Rather, the operating theory is that people who know what prison is really like will take steps to keep themselves out of it. Likewise, conservative Hell Houses showing the horrible fates of abortionists and gays are designed to use suckiness as aversion therapy.
The reason that describing the suckiness of poverty comes across as inherently liberal and thus threatening to conservative views, I think, is that so many of the incidents described revolve around children. No matter how plucky and self-reliant a 2-year-old is, she isn’t going to get anywhere without help. Sure, in 15 or 7 or however many years it takes until she’s old enough to work for a living according to your philosophy, she can give it a try, but right now she is stuck and no choice she makes will change whether she is poor. In the comments to the poverty post, the conservative objectors talked a lot about the poor judgment of poor people in having children, but not at all about the poor judgment of poor people in being children. (And I’m not even talking about the guy near the end of the second page who has some bizarre fixation with “crack whores pumping out children,” as if that population could explain the millions of uninsured and hungry kids in this country; if you seriously advocate mandatory sterilization for people you describe as worthless, does Godwin’s law apply?)
Tags:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
