Exactly. I’m so damned sick of the anecdotes of selfishness.
There’s got to be a point where we stop, as a country, looking for reasons not to give a damn, looking for an anecdote to invalidate all our desire to fix things. There’s got to be a point where we just call bullshit on it, on this thing where somebody’s cousin heard from somebody else that a woman crossed the border down in Texas just to give birth here and take our jobs, and start talking about the deliberate devaluation of the American manufacturing base and the abandonment of the city working class to chase more and more profits, not to mention the profound economic imbalances in North America, instead of bitching directionlessly that it’s all the immigrants’ fault.
There’s got to be a point where, sure, if we give everybody health care some diabetic fatass six-pack-a-day smoker is gonna get care on my tax dollar, and there’s got to be a point where we say, “Oh well, tough shit for me, then” because the benefits to us all so wildly outweigh our whack-a-do certainty that we’re the only virtuous creatures God ever made and everybody else is selling something.
There’s got to be a point where we hear some Katrina victim bought bling at Wal-Mart with his FEMA money once, and we just fucking move on instead of using that one little story to shake our heads at the whole Gulf Coast and give up, figuring fuck them, they don’t need our help anymore.
(Incidentally, I think this is why we get so crazy about stories about abused kids and animals. It’s hard to rationalize that a cat got itself set on fire on purpose in order to curry sympathy with the liberal welfare crowd.)
We have to stop this selfish crap. We have to stop picking apart everybody else’s details in an effort to make sure we’re not getting taken, because if we spent a fraction of the amount of attention we give over to examining the lives of immigrants and the poor to make sure they’re properly deserving of our largesse to actually eradicating poverty and other social ills, we could cure illiteracy, cancer, the bubonic plague and death. We have to stop getting distracted by the personal, distracted by the anecdote, distracted by the exception, because otherwise we’re entirely missing the rule, and the rule’s so much worse than the exception.
3 Responses
yes. and then i want to DO something more. thanks for the link, donna.
I disagree to the extent that I do not think it unwise or inhumane to avoid fraud or unwarranted expenditures.
No, I don’t think abuse needs to be tolerated either, gerry. I just think these “stories” of people abusing the system, this anecdotal type of opposition to good policies, is wrong.
My point would be that if your opposition to government programs is that people will abuse them in this way, then those who oppose these programs ought to also oppose the lack of government regulations that limit greed, on the same premise. As has been shown, without limits to greed, the “free market” also becomes an irresponsible mess. So those who rail against government programs but for the “free market” are also just as wrong as those who want unlimited access to government programs.
Because really the issue is that some people will abuse any system, and the point is to punish the fraud or the greed, and not everyone else because of the actions of a few.