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car accident, money, boring, college, high school, work, gardener, heat, summer, sex, Jillian Michaels, lard, tortillas, native americans, poor diet, poor people, poverty, growing your own vegetables, making your own bread, human centipede, sin city, the hobbit, dogs, creepy, bowel obstruction, wonder woman, role models, justice league, leadership qualities, back story, feminist hero, white slavery, dinner
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July 23rd, 2010 at 3:41 am
To Ben: I think “laziness” is kind of a shitty way of putting it when “tired” also sometimes applies. Especially in the case of people who are parents, people who do manual labor, and so on and so on. If someone’s taken their kids to school, then worked on their feet all day–waitressing, working as a cashier, any of the shitty jobs that kill your back and your feet and your brain–then gone to pick up their kids, then come home and try to spend some time with their kids or their spouse…well, I don’t blame them for not wanting to spend another hour looking up a recipe and then baking bread. I agree with Marina–it’s not always a case of “don’t want to”, it’s sometimes a case of “can’t.”
I also don’t blame people whose lives suck for not wanting to eat cheap oatmeal (your suggestion) or barley soup (a suggestion that crops up every time anyone has this discussion–just make a huge pot of bean soup and eat it for every meal!) for every meal every day of the week.
To Marina: The entire nature of our economic system means that not everyone can get an education. Not everyone can get a good job. There are only a certain amount of good jobs to get. Sometimes the five bucks an hour job is the only one there is. Our society is not one in which everyone can succeed, regardless of how hard they work or how educated they are. We need waitresses and janitors and cashiers and gas station attendants and factory workers to, you know, make the world fucking run, and those are not occupations that pay well, but sometimes those are the only jobs available. There are not an endless amount of well-paying jobs that everybody could have if only they got off their lazy asses and went to school.
Re: Wonder Woman, I kind of hate the new backstory, because why the hell would you get rid of her being raised by Amazons in a matriarchy? That’s what makes her so awesome! I can see how her not living up to what you think she should be as a product of that society would be disappointing, but that backstory itself is what so many people find inspiring about her, including you. I agree with you that the new outfit sucks, though–her old outfit is so iconic. Batman and Superman have both gotten costume redesigns over the years, but they’ve never been reduced to just wearing pants and a t-shirt, basically. They got to keep their iconic superhero images, and it pisses me off that WW doesn’t get to.
July 25th, 2010 at 1:15 am
“Blame” seems a little harsh, especially if you’re going to take me to task for my word choice. I wasn’t trying to make some sort of arrogant middle-class jackass point about how poor people are lazy and stupid. The only point I was trying to make was that eating healthier is possible, if you’re willing to make the effort. Not every decision is as dire as you make it out to be–do I play with my kids, or do I make bread? I’m not trying to say its always a small amount of effort either. It just seems wrong to point and say “Damn you American society, you’re filling us full of processed food and making us fat!” Surely, societal and economic conditions play a role in this sort of thing. I’m not even as hands-off as Marina, who generally seems to be of the opinion that everyone out to just survive on their wits alone, but I feel like a lot of Americans, in all walks of life, are developing an odd culture of victim-hood that encourages a refusal to take responsibility for one’s own actions. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to say where one ends and the other begins–how can we determine what is the responsibility of the individual, and what is the responsibility of society and the government. Being poor doesn’t force you to eat shitty processed food, but it does make it much more likely that you will.
July 25th, 2010 at 9:38 am
It’s not that there are good jobs and educations for everyone, but it is that every individual has just as much capacity for success as every other one. Yes poor or disabled people are less likely to succeed, but it doesn’t mean that they lack capacity.
I said at some point that the goal is to work harder or smarter than the guy behind you. It’s true that we do need waitresses, and if a person is happy being a waitress for their whole life, I’ll try not to make a judgment call, but they don’t have to be if they don’t want to be.
The difference between the TV view and my perception is the difference between saying that the poor are too stupid to do anything right and saying that the poor are people who have not (to this point in their lives) managed to outshine others for a better position. It has to do with competition, and right now they’re behind. It doesn’t have any barring on their intelligence, or even their ability. At any given time there are people who are living in poverty while going to school, or building a skill set that’s going to ensure their success later on.
The TV makes it seem like poverty is something that happens to dummies, and all the idiots watching these dummies on TV can feel superior to them and think that they don’t have to continue to work hard to try to be better. It creates a false sense of job security.
July 28th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Thank you so much for the shoutout!
I’d like to comment on the food thing. I think the reason poor people are overweight is because they are ignorant and usually lazy. Of course, this does not apply to all “poor” people, but I have seen it in my parents. I’ve recently been trying to get us to eat healthier by choosing certain foods, like I try to get the Whole grain breads high in fiber, I recently got us frozen yoghurt and “No Sugar Added” ice cream and other things like that. Once, I had the audacity to get the fat-free cottage cheese and my Mom freaked. In the end the cottage cheese tasted the same. So I’ve seen that the issue is that poor people are eating the shitty processed food because they aren’t reading either the packaging, the nutrition label and much less the ingredients list. If I don’t read the labels for my parents and fish out the better stuff they’ll grab the cheapest thing with god knows what in it.
I don’t think poor people are portrayed as dumb, but more as lazy. For example, most people’s reaction to a homeless person is, “GET A JOB YOU BUM!” or people who dislike government aid programs because “the government is handing out their hard earned tax dollars to bums in the barrio who spend it on cigarettes and booze.” Like you said, our capitalist system says, “Work harder or take your shitty life.”