A small addition for thought: While in a perfect ideal world, you're all right that the Parents are to blame for the actions of their children, it seems that no one is acknowledging that the Parents in this case ARE children, or were raised in exactly the same way these people were. It's not like a bunch of well-educated and sophisticated people had children and decided not to teach them anything and so they became poor, the Parents are just as poorly educated and confused as their children. So let's blame their Parents. Oh, no - they were poor and uneducated, too. Okay, let's blame their Parents. Hmm. This isn't working the way I expected... And before you bring up the working-class poor in other parts of the world and what a good work ethic they have or how disciplined they are, in most cases those communities have just that, a community. They have jobs, such as they are. They own the struggling businesses in that community, they own the broken-down farm, they are invested in the world around them, and they don't live side by side with people who are living in an entirely different economic reality. You have to offer people the opportunity to maintain a decent life and most importantly, to have hope. Handouts and welfare don't offer hope, they offer food for a week. But they also placate the recipients into staying in their shitholes with seven televisions in them until you have generations of uneducated and unemployable people all living under one roof until shit explodes into exactly what we're looking at.
This, right here. It's the same thing that baffled me during the LA riots, and it confuses me just as much now. Why destroy YOUR OWN COMMUNITY? I would understand going into an upper class area and wreaking havoc, but your own homes and the businesses your parents may work at? Makes no sense.
I get what you're saying...but I also look at my own life experiences here. I have no reason to be anything other than a trailer trash slut. My parents were ridiculously poor - my grandparents were uneducated...my mom was the only one of her siblings to achieve a college degree...maybe some of her cousins or relatives had one, but immediate family...nope. My dad's family were alcoholic abusive sharecroppers. My uncles lied about their ages so they could enlist in the Army and Navy and go to Vietnam. Viet-fucking-nam was more desirable than staying in their home life. Sometimes my grandparents had jobs, sometimes they didn't. My grandfather was a moonshiner, and certainly wasn't viewed in the eyes of the law as anyone you'd want at your dinner table. yes, my parents had jobs when I was growing up, but they worked hard because they saw the lifestyle their parents lived and didn't want it. They figured it out. They figured out how to work for something better, and they scrounged and saved and made a home. It wasn't a beautiful home on the hill. Truth be told, it was a trailer house in the middle of the woods. Yes, they bought the little singlewide new...but still. It was a trailer. In the woods. Middle of nowhere. No telephone, no color tv, barely had running water, my brothers and I slept in the same bedroom until I was in the 6th grade. I get what you're saying, they have no frame of reference...but why can't they figure it out? I did. My parents did. It's easy to say oh they're uneducated and can't help it, but...why can't they?
It's because it's easier for many poor people to accept the "Hey I'm poor and helpless" point of view and accept assistance than to go and make their lives better on their own. Look at it this way, if someone paid you $500 bucks a week with nothing needed in return but the alternative was you could go make $800 a week but you had to work 40 hours, which one would you pick? I agree with suapyg that opportunities for growth and success need to be improved, and at some point that desire needs to come from the people themselves. If you tell people theyre poor and cant do anything about it and hand them a check, they start to believe it and have no reason to improve. Then when the well dries up and there's no more checks to go around, they look at the wealthy who went out and made it to keep funding them. The governments oppress the poor way more than the rich ever do, it's just not explicit.
Most 1st world societies DO offer them hope - a guaranteed education and a high school diploma (or its Bri'ish equivalent) if they are willing to follow through with it. Yes, these schools may be underfunded and taught by faculty that are just counting the days until retirement, but it’s still a chance to get off the dole and into college. All of us are living in a time of unimaginable prosperity and opportunity when compared to the rest of human existence – they are idiots for not taking advantage of it. I’m generally an opponent of organized religion, but they sure did it right when it comes to charity: keep it in the community, and keep it personal. When the person being helped knows exactly who is providing for them, it provides accountability. When the person who is donating can see the good it does, it justifies giving more.
Dude, I agree with most of what you said, just not the blanket statement part about 'kids these days having worse family values being more prevalent than ever'. Unless of course you had, you know, some semblance of evidence to back that up, which seems like a tough thing to quantify. Until then, you might as well go hang out with Kimaster. Oh, and I also disagree with the part about the internet and technology being part of the problem. I'm a firm believer in Socrates' teaching that 'The only good is knowledge, the only evil is ignorance'. Despite being poor, these kids have more access to more knowledge than any other poor people in history. Seems to me that they/their parents/their education system are fucking up, not electricity running through wires and plastic. I'm also inclined to disagree with this. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but I doubt these people living on $500 a week are just loving life so much they have zero ambition to improve their situation. As if the 'scraping by' lifestyle is just so intoxicating they have no desire to even try and make things better? I know the economy sucks, and there are many more factors at play, but I don't think the concept of 'honest work for slightly more money' is either foreign or offensive to them, and it's not like the government is actively stopping them from applying for jobs.
I guess the reductionist argument is always easier to accept. In this case, the idea that poor people - as a general class, not specific examples - are so averse to work that they will live like peasants off of government money rather than live like blue-collar workers on blue collar work. Which is a nice concept if your goal is to rail against those worthless lazy slobs, but if your goal is to actually understand the problem, it doesn't quite cut it. To put it in other words, this is a nice opportunity for a lot of people to confirm their own biases, on both sides. "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." To all the people asking why the rioters are burning down their own communities, I think you're asking the wrong question. As someone stated earlier: What exactly do they have invested in these communities? Do they even consider these communities theirs? I think the evidence says quite the opposite. It's hard not to make the cause-and-effect connection between you looting someone's shop, and them going out of business and damaging the community - unless you feel the shopowner isn't even a part of your community in the first place. Then the problem's not that you don't get the connection, it's that you don't give a shit, because fuck that guy. I think here's where we start throwing around words like "underclass" and "civil society."
Here's the thing though, have you ever worked a job you hated? Would you have have taken a minor reduction in pay to be able to take a break, reduce your stress, get your life in order and find a job you wanted or pursue your passion? After all it's far easier to make time to apply to other places if you don't have a full time job. The issue is that when the better job doesn't come up in two years you've now been out of the workforce for a while and no one is going to hire you for something better than what you were already doing. So now your option is to crawl back to the same or similar type of work you left that made your life miserable, or continue to apply for better things, and lord knows you shouldn't have to endure that shit job you were working before. Honestly if I had the option of $800 a week or $500 with my last job I probably would have taken the $500 and stayed home thinking that I'd be able to find something better.
They're not looking to find something better. They're wondering why 'the rich' (or the government) doesn't just give them more. Why begrudge them a bit extra?
You're totally right. The next time I talk with an artist about how hard they're struggling, I'm going to ask them why they don't just get a job teaching at Yale. Seems ridiculous to me that they don't. Lazy freeloading fucks.
I was honestly shocked the first time I met someone like this. It was a woman who was dating a friend in college; she was going to school on the state's dime because her parents were disabled or somesuch, and she had no motivation; she was willing to accept a certain quality of life in order to not work. She said to me once that, "My mother didn't have to work a day in her life, why should I?". That guy and I are not friends anymore - he took the easy way and sunk to her level rather than trying to see how far he could go in life.
I wouldn't let pyggy get you worked up. That's exactly what he is going for. (Which, I find fascinating since maybe he should take his own advice and SU and P his G . . .) For instance, his common trick (that used by those who can't defend a rebuttal) to not answer or pretend to miss the point and then redirect shown below: Uh, except for the next 10 posts I'll make. Nope. Nobody said that. That point may be arguable, but nobody tried to disagree with that.
This is sad man. I thought you were better than this. She asks a valid question and all you can do is respond with a bullshit straw man argument? Why even reply if that's all you're going to bother to contribute?
So you have made it clear you think the system's rigged and that the tax code needs to be changed, I guess a harsher progressive income tax and bigger estate tax? That no one has an interest in the poor communities. Then you later said welfare doesn't help. What exactly are you suggesting be done? Maybe I missed it but outside what I've just listed I really don't see how you think these should be connected in some real life way.