The government is the puppet of the rich, but is itself poor. Which is why they had to make drastic cuts to their budget, which affected a shit-ton of the public assistance/welfare programs, which has enraged a lot of those people that were taking advantage of them.
Interesting editorial here. Before anyone dismisses it as "justifying the riots" or some such, give it a chance. <a class="postlink" href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peter ... he-bottom/</a>
Dude, come on. You're way smarter than that. She didn't suggest anything like that. She wrote about each generation taking incremental steps to lift itself out of poverty. I have a similar story. Both sets of my grandparents were poor and had too many kids. My mom's parents didn't even have indoor plumbing until I was 11. My dad worked his ass off at a grocery store through high school and saved as much money as he could. His mom died when he was 26 and he, the 6th out of 7 kids, paid for the funeral because nobody else in his family could. He always told me "I just want you kids to do better than I did." He stressed doing well in school and going to college all my life. He never had an ounce of help from any government, and he never one time complained about how much someone else had. Her question was why don't those people do something about improving their situation for themselves and their kids, like her parents and my parents did? Your response only means you don't have an answer to that question.
In relation to what shimmered is saying, my room mate used to talk with a guy (between 17 to 19 years old, if I recall correctly) via instant messenger who lived outside of London. This guy would always complain about had he had no money, and how he could never get a job. My room mate asked him why it was so hard to get a job, and that there must be at least some positions in fast food restaurants, or kitchens as a dish washer to at least provide some income. This guy said that he could easily get one of those jobs, as there were several openings, but that he thought he was too good for them, and refused to do that kind of work. He hadn't even finished his high school education, but turned down those jobs because he thought he was better than that. I'm not saying that every kid over there is like that, but this is probably not an isolated case.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but I was trying to say that I DON'T think poor people in general are averse to working. They have disadvantages, for sure, and there are lazy people in all walks of life, but as far as poor people go, the 'poor' in the western world have more opportunities than any poor people ever. I could be way off base here, but they live in the area, don't they? They shopped in these shops before the riots, correct? Do they really view the guy running the tiny liquor store on the corner as some kind of aristocrat? I'm no history buff, but from what I remember, revolutions involved peasants storming castles, not burning their own villages. This leads me to believe that the majority of these kids are doing it for little more reason than they think they can get away with it. Yes, I have. In fact, from the job I have now going back to my paper route at 14, I've only enjoyed maybe 10% of the jobs I've had (a bowling alley, a factory-assembly line, outdoor manual labour, among others, if you're curious). Now, in no way am I putting myself in the position of a poor person. If I wanted to, I could be a lazy fuck and live off my parents -- and I'm embarrased to admit I have had to borrow at times -- but that would involve me feeling like a piece of shit. As for pursuing my passion, I've been doing that for the last eight years, and, as it happens, I've recently got a freelance job that's going to greatly improve my portfolio and hopefully push me over the edge. So what am I doing? I'm working my day job -- which I'm lucky to have, but not something I particularly want to do -- to pay the bills, then going home at night/the weekends and working my ass off in the hopes that I'll eventually be a full-time writer. Again, I'm lucky and grateful to live in a fairly stable part of the world, economically, and having parents to fall back on if need be, and I'm not likening myself to actual poor people at all. But if an average middle class guy like me can understand the concept of 'doing less than enjoyable work in order to stand on my own financially', I'm sure most of these people can too. I don't want to make this a racial thing, but I'm reminded of my buddy/his parents who are vying to land a Tim Horton's franchise. He told me about a conversation he had with a current owner, who told him, "If you get it, hire immigrant workers. Philippinos, preferably. In my 12 years of owning two stores, I've never had a philippino call in sick or even be late for work. Stay away from the white locals. They're the laziest workers around." From growing up with a lot of philipinos, I can assure you that they/their parents came from ACTUAL poverty, not western world poverty. They are more than thrilled to live here and make $500 bucks a week, if that. The kids in this London footage don't even appear to be white trash, something that is much easier to get out of than a country like the Philippines, as Shimmered explained. ... Re-reading this, I feel like I'm coming across completely on the side of the rich, which I am not. I fully believe that the income gap around the world has been getting ever more ridiculous for the last decade, at least. More locally, it makes me sad that anyone would be against raising taxes on the ultra-rich (especially corporations). It honestly turns my stomach that Bill Gates struggles to get billionaires to give half their fortune to charity. It just seems, from the footage and reports I've seen and read, that these kids are being shitheads more than taking a political stand. I could be wrong though.
I was talking about the post you quoted. Basically agreeing with you. If Do the Right Thing taught me anything, it's that the "us vs. them" mentality is dangerous and more infectious than people realize. I'm not sure what kind of stew of racial or socio-economic or moral anger is going on in these idiots' heads, and I'm sure some of them are just doing it cause it's free stuff, but the sense I'm getting is that a lot of them think they're striking a blow for... something. Sal wasn't an aristocrat neither.
This brings to mind a debate my parents were having with some friends over dinner when I was very young...probably 13 or so...maybe 11. Friends were grousing about work and how much it sucks, and also grousing about their son's grades. The dad said "I'll whup his ass til he makes his grades...my son ain't gonna grow up to be no kinda ditch digger...". My mom nearly exploded, saying "Why? What's wrong with an honest dollar for an honest day's work? Why is he too good to do a job that needs doing?" Friend ranted on about how his kid is too good for that kind of work, with my mom arguing that anyone who can do a fair day's work for a fair wage shouldn't turn up a nose at manual labor. She agreed that yes, it's not the easiest living, but maintained her point then (and to this very day) that if it's all you can do while you're looking for something else, well...grab a shovel. Ain't nobody too good to muck a stall, clear a brushpile, or dig a ditch, and it all needs doing. Friend's kid wound up being a useless, jobless, lazy drug-dealer, and has spent several short stints in jail. I'm not sure where he is today, but I'm pretty confident that he's not a contributing member of society. NO ONE is too good to work. Plain and simple. Work needs doing...get to it. Edit: I don't consider myself or my family exceptional. We ARE exceptionally intelligent - especially my brothers, but we are not incredibly different from anyone else. My home county is poor - when I worked as a cashier at Wal-Mart, fully half of the food transactions I completed were done on the LoneStar card. Probably more than half, but I'm comfortable saying fully half. Unless you were a rancher, teacher, or nurse, you weren't making much money. We were poor, but everyone was poor. My dad didn't start supporting a family of five on more than 400 dollars a week until I was a freshman in high school. All of a sudden, the automotive repair industry was quite lucrative. We scraped by on the blisters and cuts on my dad's hands and on my mom's sheer determination to educate herself while also making sure her kids didn't grow up to become trailer trash. This isn't incredible behavior to me. It's just what you do. You see something that you want changed, you figure out how to change it, and then you do it. You just do what needs doing...
Holy cow, yes. I don't want to stray too far off base here, but I've noticed an EXTREME difference in work ethics for menial/service/manual labour jobs between Canadians and immigrant workers. I managed a downtown pub in Calgary for three years, during the big boom in '06 and '07. I could not hire a dishwasher at $14/hr. That's how bad the labour market was. Guys making that wage would walk at the slightest provocation and be hired at the restaurant next door. Every single Canadian kitchen worker was either a drug addict, an alcoholic or a flake. They all crashed and burned eventually, especially the red seal chefs. The only exceptions to this rule were migrant workers. In desperation, my boss (the owner of the pub who sat on various boards), petitioned the government to step up the immigration policies and create initiatives to allow service workers to come to Canada easily with two-year contracts. Now? That place runs like a dream. The kitchen staff and floor managers are all Philipino, Singaporean, Korean, etc. No labour problems, no missed shifts or drunken fights or drugs confiscated on the premise. Like someone else mentioned, I think living under the illusion that you're poor does not provide the same perspective as living in an actual dirt poor country.
The only point I was trying to make is that this is what makes you and your family stand out from the other people in your story. And that it IS exceptional behavior, unfortunately. I'm down in NC for a conference this weekend, but I'll try to come back and explain better before the weekend is out. I'm seeing the same problem I had in the other thread, though - there are so many places that I fundamentally disagree with a bunch of you that I've wound up being totally flippant a couple times because it's easier than writing a dissertation. I was lazy and cavalier. An absolutely fair criticism, and for that I apologize. To some of you, I definitely do believe I owe you a better answer than that. Others, well...there are others.
I was listening to The Joe Rogan Experience a couple of nights ago, and he was talking with Joey Diaz about welfare. Some excerpts: I know this is sort of getting off-topic (the riots weren't even being discussed on the podcast), but it loosely applies here, regarding the welfare mentality and sense of entitlement. Which isn't to say that "all poor people have only themselves to blame" or "all rich people are assholes" or any other blanket statement you can think of.
Y'all have some strange ideas about how much fun life on welfare is. If you're on welfare, it's probably because you're fucking broke. And being that broke is very not-fun. It's a luxurious existence of government cheese and leaky ceilings. Because they don't consider it their community. That's part of what disenfranchisement is. You see their homes, their businesses, their places of work. They see apartment buildings owned by people richer than them where the landlord won't do anything about the roaches in their apartment. Or the business where they made their mother come back to work a week after giving birth, because otherwise she'd lose her job. Or the business that overcharges them for their food. Do you think that many of the people who live in these neighborhoods are homeowners? Or small business owners? It doesn't justify the destruction of someone else's property. That's unacceptable. But the reason they don't treat it as their community is because it isn't. It's someone else's; they just live there. When people feel like the rule of law is a fiction, they tend to act accordingly. The reason the Japanese don't loot isn't because they have the not-looting gene. It's because they feel assured that the live in a nation of laws, where the innocent will be protected from criminals, the people are safe, and they won't get shot for no reason. Am I saying killing people and lighting the town on fire is fine and dandy, and we should excuse it? Of course not. But people whose needs are being met typically don't start riot. This is like one of those episodes of Arrested Development where the dad teaches them a lesson with the one-armed guy. AND THAT'S WHY YOU DON'T YELL!
QUESTION: ANSWER: Tune in for next week's episode of Why Anecdotal Evidence Is Useless! I'm not trying to discount your hard work but it may be difficult to separate your emotionally charged experiences from objective logic. You were either: A) Cockslapped by God Almighty's penis at birth and made a chosen one, or B) Born with slight advantages that made it possible for you to overcome your socioeconomic barriers Being born exceptionally intelligent makes you an outlier. Being born with parents who are smart enough to learn from their mistakes also makes you an outlier. If you were born to junkies they would probably not have "figured it out". My dad grew up in a piece of shit ghetto in Chicago. Dad knows he was unbelievably fortunate to be born white, exceptionally intelligent, and have parents who were exceptionally intelligent. If he had been born black, with unexceptional intelligence and unexceptional parents he would likely be way worse off. Using anecdotal evidence to ignore unearned privilege is silly.
This seems to stand in stark contrast with American work ethic. There are a LOT of college-educated people who are working at Wendy's right now. Yes, it definitely sucks. But they're sucking it up and saying, "Well, right now my chosen field isn't open. So I'm going to put food on the table until it opens up again, and I'm going to do it by working at Wendy's." They don't seem to get that in England. There's a large class of people there who consider the crap jobs (dishwasher, cashier, etc) to be "immigrant jobs" and therefore beneath them. Unfortunately, not all jobs are freaking awesome Work Four Hours A Day and Get 100k a Year. The world needs ditch diggers too, and there are a lot of people in any country who are only good for digging ditches. But apparently, ditch digging is one of the Jobs Britons Won't Do. And they'd rather sit there and bitch instead of bettering themselves or just buckling down and getting to work.
I will go to my grave believing this with my entire soul "The role you were given in life is not the role you have to accept - Robert Greene" My grandmother came to this country crossing a river with four small children. When she gets to the part of the story where she mentions she didn't give a fuck if everyone drowned or not, but she was going to try to make it, you can see the crazy gleam in her eye. It's this crazy gleam in someone's eye that sets these type of people apart from everyone else.
Really, dude? I think you're romanticizing this American work ethic a little bit, and taking this one unreliable anecdote about Londoners being lazy invalids a bit too seriously. The last time I checked, there was entire underclass of immigrants (legal and illegal) who were the nation's baby-sitters, landscapers, and migrant farm workers, yet unemployment rates are skyrocketing. I don't see any out of work hedge fund managers picking apples.
Aside from that: have you tried to hire anyone for a job lately? Jesus fucking Christ. Just for working in my climbing gym, the hiring process makes me want to sit and drink and weep. These people are idiots. Showing up late. Not doing their jobs. Half assing their jobs. Making excuses. AND IT'S AN EASY FUCKING JOB. There is no work ethic. Also...just because one is exceptionally intelligent does not mean one is exceptionally motivated.
Wait what the fuck? Your grandma didn't give a fuck if her four children drowned? And she has a crazy look in her eyes? Not sure how you aren't in pieces on a steel hook.