Now, if you read the Bible, Jesus Christ had a lot to say about caring for and feeding those in need. E.g., ““Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” (Luke 3:11). Or “Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:37-40). Then there’s his disciples, e.g., “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (James 2:15-17).
But Jesus Christ doesn’t live in El Cajon anymore. The people there in the El Cajon city government may claim to be Christian. The police officers handcuffing people for the crime of feeding the poor may claim to be Christian. But those are empty claims, as empty as proclaiming themselves to be unicorns or cotton candy trees. Because Christians follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, which are pretty clear about feeding the poor: You do it. Because that’s what followers of Jesus do.
It’s pathetic that twelve people who for the most part express no particular faith are more Christian than all these people in the El Cajon city government who claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, to be Christian. The hypocrisy never ends. “Christians” who don’t follow the teachings of Jesus Christ continue to be a pox on the land. So it goes.
RE: The Medicare cuts forced by the new Republican tax bill:
There are people who vote for the “Leopards Eating Faces” party then are surprised that the leopards actually ate their faces. But they’re outnumbered by far by the delusional morons who claim that no, the leopards did *not* eat their faces (as the blood from the raw meat of their ripped-off faces drip onto the carpet). Or who claim that no, it wasn’t the “Leopards Eating Faces” party that ripped off their faces, it was that woman, over there, who isn’t an elected official and holds no government position of any sort, who actually ripped off their faces. NOT the members of the “Leopards Eating Faces” party.
This has been the most bizarre time in my entire adult life. WTF, people? If you elect a party into office that promises to cut Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, why would you be surprised and upset when they actually do so?! Elect the “Leopards Eating Faces” party into power, and that’s what they do — they rip off people’s faces!
This is a disease of extreme poverty that results in anemia, confusion, extreme lethargy on the part of its sufferers. The end result was generations of Southerners stereotyped as lazy and dim-witted. It was eradicated, people thought, by septic systems and shoes. But now it’s back.
And don’t think this is just a disease of poor blacks. Some of my white relatives in Louisiana are living under similar conditions where they regularly come into contact with raw sewage pouring out from underneath their decrepit trailer homes. Really, they were living under more sanitary conditions before they got indoor plumbing — outhouses, at least, didn’t drizzle raw sewage onto the ground. But the Public Health Service that eradicated hookworm by building twenty million outhouses in the 1920’s and 1930’s is long gone. As are the outhouses, and people for some reason don’t want to go back to using outhouses, they insist on using the toilets that deposit raw poop straight onto the ground outside their decrepit trailer homes.
There are two other alternatives that at least sort of resemble a toilet in that you don’t have to go outside your house in the middle of winter and sit on a cold outhouse toilet seat — composting toilets, and the Incinolet. The wiring in many of these homes won’t support an Incinolet, and nobody is pushing or subsidizing composting toilets as a solution. Not to mention that composting toilets are rabidly opposed by the poor people who would use them, “we want to just sit down on our toilet and flush like you rich people, we don’t want to have to mess with throwing dirt in with our shit and turning a handle and such.” That’s if they even know composting toilets exist — most don’t, because we no longer have a Public Health Service that is focused on sanitation, and county health departments only fine people, they don’t educate people, so nobody contacts the county health department asking what they should do.
And the result of this Libertopia, where nobody enforces sanitation laws or helps poor people comply with sanitation laws, is the return of a parasite that plagued the South for centuries and led to all the stereotypes of lazy stupid Southerners… yay, Libertopia! But maybe that’s the point. If you keep them lethargic they won’t rise up in rebellion. If you keep them dazed and confused, they won’t vote for the Democrats who could help them. Why, if you’re a Republican, a hookworm epidemic or a brain-invading parasite epidemic is exactly what you want! Yay!
After a spoon was found on her during a traffic stop, a spoon she insisted was last used to eat Spaghetti-O’s at the office for lunch, Ashley Gabrielle Huff was kept in jail awaiting trial on bogus meth charges due to astonishingly high bail despite the fact that she had no criminal record, was married, had children in the schools, and otherwise was no flight risk. She was ready to plead guilty and forever give up her voting rights just to get out of jail if they gave her time served. Then the lab results came back, months after the spoon had been submitted to the state crime lab: Spaghetti sauce.
Just as she’d insisted from the beginning.
Our drug war is ridiculous. A spoon? That was all they had, a spoon, and purported residue on said spoon? Yet that was all it took to deprive her of her rights and put her in a cage for months.
The reason I bring this up is because there is now a widespread movement amongst progressives to reform the bail system to do away with injustices like that. Bail bondsmen in the state of California are outraged about it, but the fact of the matter is that most people in jail are not there because they’ve been sentenced for a crime. They’re there because they can’t afford bail. And while they’re in jail, they’ve lost their job, their children may be in foster care, their home was repossessed or they were evicted with no ability to retrieve their belongings, their college kicked them out for non-attendance and kept their tuition money, and otherwise had their lives destroyed.
Back in the 60s and 70s — which I, sad to say, actually remember — there was much talk about the disintegration of the black family and of African-American values more generally, and how that was the root cause of America’s poverty problem. And the social dysfunction was clearly real. But was it cause or effect? William Julius Wilson, in When Work Disappears, famously argued that it was a symptom: good jobs in inner cities, where African-American men could take them, went away, and the cultural changes followed.
So, how could you test that hypothesis? Well, here’s an experiment: change the structure of the economy in such a way that a large class of white men — say, white men without a college degree — similarly lose access to good jobs. If Wilson was right, we’d expect to see a sharp decline in stable marriages, a rise in unwed births, growing drug use, and other forms of social disruption.
Which, uhm, is what we’re seeing amongst poor whites today.
Seems like all the bigots who said poor blacks’ values were the cause of their social dysfunction were just that — bigots. Otherwise they’d be talking about how poor whites’ values are the cause of their social dysfunctions today — the decline in stable marriage amongst poor whites, the rise in unwed births, growing drug use, etc.
Reality: It’s tough being poor. It grinds people down. Communities made up primarily of poor people become dysfunctional in many, many ways. Claiming it’s their values making them poor was a cheap shot then, and it’s a cheap shot now, though it’s a cheap shot that I occasionally make because the parents of these same poor whites whose society is disintegrating were the same bigots who claimed that it was black cultural values that were the cause of social dysfunction in the black community.
But our lizard overlords are great at making us fight each other rather than unite to fight our lizard overlords, so I guess guillotine time is going to be a while. If ever.
We should be grateful, I suppose. They could kill more, after all. It’s what cold-blooded lizard people from planet Sociopath do — come up with new and better ways to kill human beings, who they view as prey, not as fellow travelers in life.
Massive tax hikes for non-billionaires (the “healthcare tax”, which may not be taken out of your paycheck by government, but it’s taken out of your paycheck nevertheless).
1/6th of the population uninsured as the individual health insurance marketplace goes into a *literal* death spiral and
those on Medicaid lose their coverage.
But hey, I’m sure all that money that the billionaires get as tax cuts will trickle down to the rest of us, just like it has during the past 30 years of stagnant or declining real salaries for white males… i.e., just like a two-story outhouse.
Q: When you looked into inequality and hope, you found some really interesting differences between poor whites, blacks and Hispanics, right?
A:Yes. One of the things we find is that there is really low optimism for the future among poor whites, and desperation and suicide. Even though Hispanics and blacks are equally poor and probably more disadvantaged on many fronts, they maintain much higher levels of optimism about the future, and they’re not suffering from the same levels of suicide and depression.
Now, I don’t know about Hispanics, but I taught plenty of poor whites and poor blacks back during my teaching days. So I think about the poor white people that I taught, and the poor black people that I taught, and what was the biggest difference between them, and what it boils down to is respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Specifically, the black kids damn well respected learning and professionalism. The black boys in particular might put on some attitude, but you go in there wearing a suit and tie and shiny black shoes instead of dressed like some high school kid and you’re strong and professional, and they respect the fuck outta that — and the girls especially responded. As did the parents. Now, there’s problems in the black community, I won’t deny that. But lack of respect for learning isn’t one of them, and neither is lack of respect for professionals. In fact, black women are on track to become the most educated group in America. A larger percentage of black women are in college than is true of any other group. Even Asians, the supposed “model minority”, send a smaller percentage of their population to college.
The poor whites, on the other hand… they didn’t respect learning. That was “egghead stuff”. “Why do I need to learn this?” was the constant plaint of their kids. They had no respect for intellectuals or professionals of any kind, who they viewed as “disrespecting them” by using all them thare big words with, like, more than four letters ‘n’ stuff, y’know. Education was treated with suspicion and professionals were as well.
Needless to say this completely limited their options when things didn’t go well. Meanwhile, blacks know why they haven’t gotten their slice of the American pie — white people been keeping them down. But not out. They have 150 years of survival experience dealing with what white people been dishing out and white people still ain’t managed to knock’em out. And now that their women folk at least are getting educated, and white people seem to be killing themselves off… fuck, why *shouldn’t* they have hope that their future may be better than their past. I mean, 160 years ago they were fucking slaves, and now a black woman is the billionaire owner of a television network! So yeah, things might suck — especially for black men, who have their own issues — but hope ain’t dead for them.
But for the poor white trash class that despises education and “desk jobs”? Whose sole aspiration was to be a truck driver or a factory worker or a miner, and never had any dreams beyond that? Well, their dream jobs are going away — even truck drivers are going to be an extinct species within the next forty years as self-driving trucks become the norm — and shit, what more do they have to hope for? They despise education and “desk jobs”, but that’s all that the economy is producing other than McJobs, so they end up sayin’ “will there be fries with that order sir?” at the local McFood joint and taking the proceeds and shooting up heroin and killing themselves.
So yeah, I ain’t surprised by this study that looked at “hope” showing that poor whites have less hope for their future than blacks and Hispanics. When you’ve systematically shut off all avenues for entering the professional classes by disdaining education and “desk job” people… well fuck. You might as well just go out in the cow pasture and shoot yourself in the head, already. Poor white trash culture is a sick culture, even sicker than black culture (where there is a lot of despair on the part of a large minority of black males, but that’s offset by the fact that black women are pulling above their weight class), and I suspect we’re going to see a lot more dead bodies — and not a helluva lot of good coming out of white trash America, where the politics of spite are still the rule. Where if they’re underneath a highway bridge living in a cardboard box cooking a dead pigeon over a hobo stove, they’ll gladly vote for someone who’ll take their hobo stove away if it means that the black guy the next bridge over don’t even have a cardboard box.
Well thing is, they done this already, and the black guy the next bridge over, he asked his woman for another cardboard box and she gave him one. So now what?
Well, you know the answer to that one. They be killing themselves with opioids and despair. How dare that black man get a free cardboard box from his baby momma!
RT @Stonekettle: It's like Republican thought, "How can we be the absolute shittiest people? The shittiest government possible? Yeah! Let's…/Twitter 19 hours ago
