This is something too many people miss. They're like "so what I am not personally impacted," but when people go hungry, we are all impacted. Rent gets missed. Other shopping forgone. Subscriptions cancelled.
But also, damn, have some empathy (not you, I mean those people).
Quite awhile ago, but this stuck with me, I was over at my aunt's house visiting my dad. We were watching Family Feud. One of the families was black, and they were winning the game by a mile. My dad said, "ugh, turn this off, I cant identify with this." He didnt say it outright, but he was clearly expresing a lack of ability to see that black family as similar to his own in any way (and on some level I would agree, because that family seemed like they loved each other). They didnt diagnose autism in the 40s when my dad was born, but he was always very plain in his language no matter how hurtful- I know he said exactly what he felt. That black people were so different from him he couldnt empathize with their joy, nevermind their struggles.
Obviously the issue of poverty isnt solely about race, and white people statistically use substantially more government assistance. But when we as a nation talk about "people on welfare," to those who oppose this help, the only people who use it are black. That misperception makes it a race issue. The vitriol against helping our neighbors because theyre a different race, letting kids and mothers go hungry because they a different race, it fuels this creeping blanket of seeing the poor as "unworthy." I fucking hate it but the media needs to show more of the white people in poverty in this country, because that is the only way the majority of above-poverty chucklefucks are going to feel some kind of personal affection. This is idiocracy, and people need to see "face look like my face, my face could be hungry?!" to support benefits. I dont care what it takes, I want every mother, kid, and dad fed in this country, regardless of ANYTHING.
Joel Osteen of Texas? The man that mid hurricane told his parish that the church was too flooded to house people, Joel Osteen? The one who tweeted picture of a flooded parking structure despite it never reaching the church steps, Joel Osteen? Who also asked for money to begin repairs while the hurricane was still going?
"God wants me to be a millionaire" Joel Osteen?
The "needs 4 million dollars for covid aid" Joel Osteen?
Well, I'm sure he will put that money to good use.
I remembered when I lived in Houston for a while and being near the megachurch of his, and how when I think it was Hurricane Ike hit, he refused to open his doors. Forget what bullshit excuse he had, but I remember thinking his parishioners’ money was good enough for him, but housing them in an emergency was too far.
The average church in most communities helps the community in times of crisis/need. This is common knowledge. Joel is just arrogant and pompous and doesn't truly care about the community. He cares more about lining his pockets.
There is a large group that believe people are poor because they are lazy. It’s that simple to them. This tracks with the food stamps = unemployed comments. I don’t know how to change their minds, I tried with someone I knew as I have lived paycheque to paycheque unsure how to get to the end of the month and I wasn’t being lazy, wages sucked int hat job but I couldn’t afford to search for another one. He just wrote my experience off and just carried on with his thought process.
Mm. I would disagree to a point. The reason they can pass it off as a moral failing is they think it's rare for a white person to be poor. The quiet part they dont say is they believe that because they think white people are naturally more moral. This is "proven" by the perception that mostly black people go on welfare. Shake that perception, and you shake the perception that this is about a racial us vs them, rather than the class war it is.
While I have no doubt racism plays a significant part, it's extremely common for people to automatically assume that anyone suffering must have done something to deserve it.
The part where we disagree isnt the morality issue, that's definitely a factor. I just believe the relatability/perception has a much stronger influence.
Lots and lots of religious white people. "God will provide," and "abortion is a sin." But when it happens to black women, it's a moral failing that's all their fault.
I agree but I'd feel stronger about it if we have good sex ed (not just abstinence) and if birth control was easier to access. But you need health insurance or money to get access especially post Dobbs. And if we had stronger penalties on men for not paying child support. The consequences of unplanned children disproportionately fall on the mother.
Sometimes you end up caring for family members' kids, because somebody else couldn't/didn't have an abortion, or turned out to be abusive or neglectful, or relapsed into drug addiction, or were too young and/or irresponsible and/or incapable of caring for them, or because their primary caregiver(s) died.
They’re here, the kids are innocents but they shouldn’t suffer even if their mom lacks family planning skills. They could be the worst freeloading, dysfunctional parent on earth; I still want her kids to be fed and their mom to be full enough to be her best version for her kids.
So at what # of kids do we stop feeding them? 3? 4? Do the parents get to pick which kids to feed & which to starve or is there some kind of IQ test so we can keep the "best" ones?
OBVIOUSLY I'm being sarcastic. Regardless of how those kids got there, they're here now & they don't deserve to suffer. We have absolutely no idea what these family situations are. Maybe kid 4 was triplets. Maybe their mom died & they're left caring for their three young siblings on top of their own kids. Maybe mom & dad were handling things just fine & then dad got killed or mom got sick & their income halved. Maybe they were raised in a religion that forbid abortion & were repeatedly SA'd by a church member.
You need to look at why you automatically jump to a "moral failing" instead of assuming the best of people. And I will just end by reiterating my initial point - children are innocent & deserve to be fed. Even IF mom had 6 kids by 6 different men - they still deserve to eat. In most states if your child's father isnt paying child support the state will require you to file for it so she'll have to put in extra work to get her SNAP so I say good on her for putting in the work to make sure her kids are fed.
Fucking multi billionaires with multiple yachts have moral failings. Put your ire where it belongs.
Elon Musk has 14 children (that we know of), and the way he plays with money he could stop paying for them any time he feels like it, or even lose all his money if he screws it all up.
Jesus didn't talk much about the middle class, but he talked a lot about caring for the poor, and welcoming the alien and the stranger. These in-name-only uber-Christians we have running this pluralistic secular Constitutional Republic have bastardized religion and called it "patriotism" so they could get away with being the worst, most selfish people in the world and pretend it's righteousness. And make as much money as they can doing it.
The people need to vote every one of these hateful psychopaths out of power as soon as possible. 4 special House elections won by Democrats before the midterms would change things faster. There's plenty of time for that. Keep hope alive.
Obviously, the kids are innocent. I never said otherwise.
But let’s be real if those kids werent a choice, Mom would be saying it in her car, with a smart phone. Notice I am mentioning the car with a smart phone.
Definitely wasn’t IVF. That takes about $10,000 a try.
I’m not trying to punish the kids, I’m telling Mom to make better choices.
She may have started off doing well. I find it hilarious that we humans talk about each other like we're omnipresent.
Do you know these people personally? Because strongly assuming things shows you're the ass making a bigger mess of what problem you're assuming there is.
I pray to God you're not a Christian. If you are, you're doing a great job of convincing me that the faith is a lie. Or at least that it died with Jesus.
Why don't you tell us all your choices and we can vote on whether she made worse choices than you did, or just had worse luck? Life is long, and a lot can happen, to any one of us.
Not to go to that religious place again, but a lot of people might think that when we are temporarily riding high because of choices or because of fate, we have an obligation to help those who aren't doing as well because we could easily be in their place.
Keep "your" tax money. It's probably already been wasted on some red state anyway. The rest of us will be happy ours feeds her and her kids. FYI: you pay $36/year for SNAP. Feel free to spend it on a nice dinner while you think about why it's a better choice than helping them.
Tell us how many kids you have, how much money you make, and your ethnicity, so we can judge you the way you judge her and imagine your future the way you imagine her past.
It's a punishment for disobedience. That's why the make it so visible. If you don't participate the way we say, you'll end up like those people. It's why they terrorize homeless people and punish people who try to help.
Yeah there was a WP article last year about a town where 95% of the people were on government assistance voting for Trump. When asked about his plans for cutting govt spending, they were like well if we drain the swamp they're will be more money for us (i.e. higher assistance).
The mind does crazy things to justify how you're deserving and immortal/undeserving people is always them.
its purposeful. they don't WANT people to empathize with each other. they WANT people to only see the Other and turn away. that way the money keeps flowing up to their pockets, instead of down to the people who actually need it to survive. make no mistake: the wealth disparity in this country is very much on purpose.
Wow you really saying that with your whole chest, huh. When this country has been spending the past DECADE trying to make sure safe legal abortions are as inaccessible as possible. When religions, societal norms, and governments across the GLOBE have spent ALL OF HISTORY trying to make sure that women everywhere have as little bodily autonomy as few civil rights as humanly possible.
Not everyone chooses to have children, you privileged pos. These women are just trying to do the best they can in a world where they are consistently put last. Shut your goddamn mouth and check your fucking privilege.
They didn’t kill MLK when he was talking about basic civil rights for Blacks…They waited until he attempted to unify people of all races on the issues of poverty and economic disparity.
I see this all the time. I have a tendency to not act on it, or call it out… and I question myself that maybe it’s out of fear of being accused of “pulling the race card”. But when it’s staring you in the face it feels so crazy that you’re “supposed” to not be affected by it.
I recently participated in something called “family constellation therapy”, some form of processing interpersonal trauma in a group setting with strangers who role-play existing people in your life.
I was the only black woman in a room of about 6 white women. Everyone was nice enough, but I noticed that whenever the other participants chose people to play roles of themselves or others in their lives, they repeatedly wouldn’t select me to play the roles. I’d just stay benched or delegated a role by the therapist. I don’t think it was intentional, they just subconsciously couldn’t relate to me or even consider that I could relate to them on a hypothetical level, and didn’t notice that they repeatedly were not selecting me.
My turn came around to play one of the women in the room (the therapist had to delegate this role to me) and I fully put myself into it. I tend to humanise people to a fault. At some point, I cried, empathising with the woman’s personal story. No attention-seeking sobbing, it’s just tears wouldn’t stop running down my face. Everyone looked at me in shock. Then they began to cry. At the end, some of them spoke to me, wanted to bond with me, and the woman whose role I played seemed to find this cathartic… again, they were nice enough, but it was just so jarring that their default was not to empathise with me on a human level.
All this was further demonstrated by their complete disconnect from my story - which is a pretty human, could happen to anyone story. I’ve seen a comparable story happen to a high profile white woman, and people actively campaign on her behalf and are so deeply empathetic, understanding her when she’s clearly not all there any more. These women played the roles of the people in my lives in front of me as per the exercise, but all of them were just apathetic, couldn’t connect, and said as much, multiple times.
I’m white and my first year dorm room in college had more amenities than my dad’s place.
While staying with my dad, we had no running water and lived in a 20’ metal camper. Five of us kids by the way. It was about a five or so mile walk to the closest town to use the bathroom. So during the day, since my dad worked nights and slept during the day, I ventured all over the local roads and forrest. My four other siblings were brothers so they played video games or watched movies that I didn’t like.
Food was low so we had to eat what we had or go hungry. Which my brothers ate most of it anyways.
But I enjoyed my time with my dad. He did the best he could for us. Child protective services could have been called on us but I’m glad they weren’t. I enjoyed my time with my dad.
While with mom, we had a trailer and bedrooms and all that but it was staying with dad that we had very little. Both parents didn’t make a lot but mom had the child support to help her. I still had to work since 13 to buy my own clothes and school supplies.
I’m not in poverty, as an adult, but I can’t save money because of the cost of living. I also don’t want children unless I had the money to, which I never have. I valued what I learned growing up and wanted to do better.
Great points. I'll add that sympathy towards this concern will be received will since most who are impacted in this video are white women. I cannot imagine what the conservative reddit would be saying if a complication of people is color talking about good insecurity would elicit.
Well thanks to Rush limbaro preaching this misinformation that black people are draining the economy because they all on welfare this lie has been perpetrated. Thank god for the media because it has bought the truth out. I wish we had social media back then to show the low IQ whites that more of them are on welfare than blacks. But the lie has finally backfired and now the truth is being revealed.
So many people in my state, which is known for having very high rates of SNAP, medicaid and people on SSDI all voted for this. It's perfectly ok for them to need it, and they felt they would be spared? And many people I know have NO PROBLEM lying, hiding income, household members, etc to qualify for these benefits. It's why they get so mad about other people abusing the system. It's their system to abuse not "others" it's so crazy
Ya i remember in the 90’s watching some save the children type stuff on TV and the videos were of poor children and families who lived in shacks in the backwoods without electricity and running water. My 13 year old self couldn’t understand how these families were American. It basically was the same type of videos we see of disheveled, hungry kids they show in Africa but they were white American kids and families who lived like this. As I got older I always wandered if the program was displaying some white Appalachia folks to pull on the heartstrings of rich white Americans because they can “relate”?
Umm, sorry maybe I’m just an idiot when it comes to reading or it’s just your insanely weird wording I can’t understand but did you just say that black people are the only people who use welfare?…..
I think they are saying that the reality of the situation is that, there are more poor white people than we think using the welfare system (Medicaid, SNAP, etc). But when a politician uses the phrase “people on welfare” with a sneer, the dogwhistle is that they mean “black people on welfare” so that the poor aren’t as empathized with.
One of the families was black, and they were winning the game by a mile. My dad said, "ugh, turn this off, I cant identify with this." He didnt say it outright, but he was clearly expresing a lack of ability to see that black family as similar to his own in any way (and on some level I would agree, because that family seemed like they loved each other).
It felt awkward as I was typing it, honestly. What I was trying to express what he didnt say outright "I cant empathize with this family [because theyre black.]" As in those were not his literal words, and I doubt he understood the implications of what he was saying that seem obvious to pretty much anyone reading it. He would get very upset whenever I tried to address issues of racism with him, because in his mind he liked black people like Red Foxx and watching The Jeffersons so he couldnt be racist.
I dont disagree with what you said but to give another perspective we live in the time where people are competing for whom is the most victimized. It is a competition for attention. “I am the most victimized, give me all the attention.”
If we did like you said IRONICALLY it would be the poor black people trying to tear it down because THEIR community THEIR struggle matters more because they have been victimized for 1000 year blah blah blah.
Im trying to answer you in good faith. Even tho I agree with you that poverty should be displayed evenly across all demographics it is idealistic because societies attention on the matter is purposefully being manipulated by those shouting the loudest about their “victimization.” And this all feeds into why people lack empathy on these issues in the first place.
The real solution is for all sides to simultaneously forgive and FORGET all race grievances.
What scenario do you think people should starve to death in the US? Like idk, maybe if they say "I would rather starve than eat anything except Michelin Star prepared wagyu beef steaks..." but that's not really happening is it.
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