If you think that's not what it already is (and always has been), you clearly haven't studied history. And those top tier prospects? They go to expensive Ivy League colleges. If they feel the need to serve, then the military puts them through those Ivy League schools, and then they become officers.
I hate when people who grew up above the poverty line decide that if they grew up poor they would automatically be better or different. Here is a review of a book that dispels that myth with new science. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir – review Does being poor lead to bad choices? By Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian
Given the topic of the thread, the fact that you're blaming the mods instead of the posters is making me lafflafflaff.
Seconded. These types of threads lead to long running pissing contests between posters, which undermine the whole deal. Whats the point though? We already have a board were politics are fair game and mods edit posts. I remember when things like this would be shot down immediately.
What if we are supposed to have a moderately intelligent discussion where we disagree, but still like one another?
We do? Must have missed that part. At any rate, imo it's just some people (I don't know or care who; I think it varies from thread to thread) taking a dislike to something that is otherwise funny, and the thread goes down from there. At least in my neck of the woods though, ever since the Zimmerman trial there seems to me to be this palpable tension whenever something even remotely hinting at race or social class comes up (whether jokingly or not). Same thing with gun rights after the CT shooting. Make a black joke? Bam. All the sudden I'm a racist (but if I make a joke about women being in the kitchen I get high fives). I mention I own a gun? I immediately have to justify a reason for it (but taliban jokes are still cool). And I live "Deep in the heart of Texas." I cannot remember any other point in my life where society -- again, at least where I live -- has been this on edge about one or two things, never mind one or two things in particular that if brought up cause insta-debate. This board seems to reflect real life for me in that regard. (And I appreciate it that this board does reflect real life.)... Spoiler I think on a more broad scale, society at large is changing right now, almost getting kneaded like bread, the top turned over. The issues our parents had are now accepted realities, and what they were cool with are things we now take offense to. Gay marriage and marijuana legalization is now an accepted part of our country's eventual reality, whereas racial prejudice and archaic laws are no longer ok with us because they don't reflect what we want and logically need. Just something I noticed, and I suspect I'm not the only one. Didn't mean to derail, but figured it was an important observation. Carry on.
Y'all ever see what a poor person can do to a home through section eight or HUD? It will snatch that helping hand right off of your arm.
Welfare should come with birth control. Not being able to take care of a child is child abuse in and of itself. Stop having kids if you can't afford to feed the ones you have. Just my .02
No no. That's the government taking control of someone's body. See, the system can provide groceries and choose which groceries will pass muster, but forced family planing is body high jacking.
I'd still like to see studies on the characteristics of people who made it out, because some do. Personality traits? Hard work? Random acts of luck? Government funded programs? Whatever it is, it would be cool to know. What I'm still on the fence about in this own thing is that personal accountability has to come somewhere otherwise... how can people ever change anything? I see the same problem with obesity. Sure, your parents fed you crap and you got dealt a shitty hand with genetics, but then again, how can you hope to change if none of it is within your power? And why can some people make it, despite the odds being stacked against them? I don't have an answer, I'm just throwing it out there. I'm a pragmatist anyway, I'll go for whatever decreases poverty and helps people have a chance to succeed in life, whether it's shaming the poor or creating more support programs.
I have. My first real job was managing low-income apartments. It definitely tested my empathy. I remember doing an inspection of an apartment of a 22 year old single mother with six kids. The cockroach smell was five feet in front of the door. Clothes were all over the floor, and where there weren't clothes there was trash of some sort. I distinctly remember seeing what looked like an entire package of crackers crushed up in the middle of her living room floor. Her stove was covered in grease. The bathroom had dirty diapers balled up in a corner behind the door. I had never seen anything like that before. I considered myself to be a slob, but I had never left spilled chocolate syrup pooled in cupboard like she had. She ended up moving out before I could evict her for non-payment of utilities. The electricity was cut off for a few days before I cleaned out the apartment. I posted pictures of the fridge on here I think. Cleaning out that apartment was by far the nastiest thing I have ever done. It was an order of magnitude or ten worse than having to haul dead cattle (or even accidentally mowing over the remnants of several dead calves). The image that sticks though is the image of one of her middle children. This child could not have been older than 8. She was sitting quietly on the couch as I walked through the apartment. A Katt William's special was on TV and in the midst of his obscenities she was reading. Reading. That's something I can't get students of mine who have every advantage to do on their own accord on the best of days. That's the image that will last a lot longer than remembering the milk that was rotted so completely it had three different levels. So every time people talk about government handouts, welfare queens, or how poor people are so fucking terrible in general, I see her reading in the midst of all that chaos. And I think about her going hungry after school or having to sleep in a room with six people instead of three because they can't afford decent housing or any of the other miseries that she could be subjected to simply because she was unlucky enough to be born into a cycle of poverty that she has little hope of breaking on her own. Is there waste in the system? Unequivocally, yes. That waste is a luxury we can afford. The alternatives are grim and border on brutishness when as a whole the rest of us have so much. The image of those full shopping carts abandoned at the register shouldn't enrage you as much as the thought of a single child lying in bed right now with an incessant pain of hunger wondering where his next meal is going to come from.
That sounds like something more reserved for CPS than welfare. Clearly kids deserve some kind of protection, even the most conservative/tea party etc, can agree with that. However the filth that kid lived in wasn't an issue of poverty or not having enough food, it was an issue of having someone as a parent who is unable to take care of them
So every parent that is financially unable to feed their children deserves to have those children taken away? Besides being absolutely horrific, that plan is going to cost you a whole lot more than helping to feed those children would.
I didn't say that people who can't afford kids need them taken away. The bigger issue though, is why I even posted in this God forsaken thread.
I totally agree that poor people should move away from their families and friends and strike off into the great unknown. Unless they're women. Then they're asking to be raped. Come on, people. The Maryville thread and this one has made for some ugly reading. I know at least some of you are more thoughtful and more compassionate than this.
Way to brush over the context. Parents who make the choice to force their children to live in filth don't deserve to keep the children that they have and damn sure don't need to have more. Living in food filth and piles of soiled diapers is a choice that is made by the parents. Nobody is asking for a spic and span household. People are suggesting that taking out the trash rather than tossing it on the floor should be a core competency.