Passing Judgement

[shadeaux]

Lyric  (1000+ posts)      Tue Nov-08-11 08:07 PM

Original message

It's perfectly fine to pass judgement on someone else's choices.

 So long as nobody's trying to legally REMOVE those choices, "judging" them is A-****ing-Okay. I don't give a damn whether someone else dislikes or disapproves of my choices. They can be pissed about it. They can hate it. They can call me any name in the book. So long as they aren't trying to legally take that choice AWAY from me, they can pass judgement ALL DAY LONG and I don't care. I'm guessing that most people here probably agree with the idea that, so long as LEGAL rights are protected, we all have the right to dislike, disapprove of, and "judge" anyone we *******ed-well please.

That being said--trying to defend that horrid, neglectful, selfish Duggar couple by claiming that we shouldn't "judge" their "choice" is ****ing disgusting. Of COURSE we're going to judge their choice. Almost every time we give nine kinds of hell to the morons on the right, we're doing it out of JUDGEMENT for their shitty, stupid, narrow-minded, self-indulgent CHOICES. I haven't seen anyone claim that we should tie that Duggar woman down and rip out her uterus (although honestly, that sucker is probably ready to fall out on its own by now). Nobody's suiting up to go storm their compound and legally remove their right to have more children. But I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here and pretend like all choices are morally equal, because they are NOT. Nobody is asking the fundie right-wingers to APPROVE of abortion, for example. Nobody's asking them to stop preaching against it or condemning people to hell for it. Their religion, their choice. We just don't want them to make it ILLEGAL for the people who don't agree with them. They can "judge" all they want; it's when they try to force that judgement upon other people via the law that we have a serious problem.

What those Duggar people are doing is incredibly selfish. Frankly, I'm pretty sure that both of them are sick in the head. And their older kids...I can't believe that some people here HONESTLY want to compare forced domestic servitude and forced full-time parenting to "a few chores and babysitting". Are you ****ing SERIOUS?! Jesus. There is no equivalency between asking a child to change a diaper or babysit for an hour, and forcing a child to take on FULL-TIME parenting responsibilities for a baby that they did NOT bring into this world, in ADDITION to cleaning, cooking, and housework for a family of 20+ people. Those two situations are NOTHING alike.

There is also ZERO equivalency between judging the dickish, selfish, asinine reproductive behavior of the Duggar cult and the right-wing desire to legally take away reproductive rights. Those two things are ALSO completely unalike.

I don't know why there appears to be a sudden deluge of Duggar Defenders here at DU, but it's disgusting to witness. Do I think that the Duggars should lose their legal right to reproduce? No. Do I think that we should condemn them as loudly and frequently as possible, so as to discourage others from imitating their reckless, negligent behavior? HELL YES.

And as for the claim that the Duggars are "making it on their own"...ROFLMFAO.   

Sure, they make it on their own--just like Wall Street and the Phelps clan does. Gotta milk the gullible suckers in this world for everything you can get. Infamy is ****ing LUCRATIVE.

 

Speaking of milking gullible suckers :

»
Please, we just need some food.

My sister and I decided that we could save money by moving in together, but this month, everything has gone wrong. She lost her Food Stamps due to a bureaucratic computer mistake and it's going to take weeks to fix. In the meantime, we've been trying to feed six people on Food Stamps meant for two. I couldn't just let my sister and her kids go hungry. I used *my* Food Stamps to buy groceries for all of us, but the amount I get isn't even close to the amount needed to feed six people. It's the end of the month and things are BAD. The freezer is empty and the fridge is empty of nearly everything that isn't a condiment. We have four kids to feed between us. They already had to do without Easter baskets or candy; I think I'll die if I have to tell the kids that they'll have to do without food. We've cooked all the ramen, spaghetti-o's, beans, and rice that we had. We've been to the food banks, but we can't go back for 3 months. I don't know what else to do.

Please god, help us feed the kids. Me and my sister are willing to do without, but the little ones need food. There are three boys (ages 7, 9, and 11) and one girl (age 12). They eat breakfast and lunch at school on the weekdays, but we need to feed them dinners on the weekdays and all meals on the weekends. My sister's Food Stamps won't be credited to her EBT card until the 8th at the absolute earliest, and maybe not until next month if the computer mistake takes longer to fix; please, please help us.

Gift cards for grocery stores are absolutely fine if you'd rather not send cash--the closest store to us is Kroger (which is best, since we don't have a car) but we can take the bus to Wal-Mart or K-mart if we have to. We could also use a few other non-grocery things like shampoo, soap, and toilet paper, but the food is the most important thing. We're down to 6 slices of bread, 1 egg, a bag of frozen peas, and some old lunch meat ham that I'm not sure is even good anymore. I have no idea what we're going to do for dinner tomorrow night. 

I also don't see the Duggars asking for help to hunt down a baby daddy in Australia for money owed.  I don't see the Duggars on every government program known to man.  And I don't see Mother Duggar running her mouth on some moonbat website pretending she knows everything because she's a perpetual student with a fat ass to boot.

Now, who needs to STFU ?

[shadeaux]

Lyric  (1000+ posts)      Sat Nov-28-09 12:12 PM

Original message

About Poor People Having Children

 I occasionally hear (both here and elsewhere) the idea put forth that poor people shouldn't have children because they can't afford to care for them by themselves and certain people resent having to help them with tax dollars. It got me thinking about long-term consequences, so please bear with me.

Firstly, it's pretty much a given that the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches dream is a myth. There are incredibly rare exceptions, of course--lottery winners, people who have unbelievable good luck and talent who manage to overcome enormous obstacles and move into the middle class--but for the most part, poor people tend to STAY poor. Poverty is a lifelong baseline condition for most poor people; there are income hills and valleys, but the state of being poor is usually there for good. With that in mind, I think it's safe to assume that someone who is poor during their reproductive years is probably going to be poor in their elderly years, too.

We all know that Social Security is not enough to live on in and of itself. It's meant as a supplement to pensions, retirement savings, etc. Social Security is a balm against literal starvation, but it is not a barrier to poverty, eviction, or the inability to pay the additional costs of being old.

So if the poor cease to have children--who's going to care for them when they're old? I assure you, even if the children of poor elderly people are poor themselves, they DO contribute to Mom and Dad's care. So are the taxpayers going to take over and make up the slack for the children that the elderly poor don't have? I'm not even considering retirement accounts or pensions here, because those are things that are relevant to the middle class--not the poor. We don't save. We can't. And our jobs aren't the sort that offer pensions.

If the taxpayers will end up footing the entire bill for the elderly poor who have no children to supplement their Social Security, then how has any tax money been saved? I mean, this is simple social reality--every generation helps to care for the one that came before it. If we remove (or even greatly reduce) the younger generation of low-income people, what will the consequences be? Greater taxpayer costs as we all pick up the slack and provide the percentage of their care that their children would have been providing, obviously, but what else?

The destruction of the communities where low-income people live and raise their families comes to mind first. I suppose that doesn't mean much to the middle-class, but to low-income workers, our communities are incredibly important to us. The poor in America still practice the barter system, for example. A mother might provide after-school childcare to a neighbor in exchange for free access to their washer and dryer because she can't afford to buy a W/D set herself. A father might trade his labor (fixing a leaky roof, for example) to a neighbor for fresh produce out of their garden because he doesn't have enough of a yard to plant a garden himself. Community is vital to the poor in ways that the middle-class could never understand. All classes occasionally barter, but only the poor do it because they HAVE to. The most valuable support resource that poor people have is each other. Failure to maintain (not even increase, just maintain) the population in those neighborhoods means fewer non-government resources for poor people to turn to when they need help. The mother who doesn't have a washer and dryer would end up needing more government assistance to get a set or pay for a laundromat. The mother with no childcare would have to rely on government assistance to pay for a daycare that she might or might not have transportation to get back and forth to. The neighbor with the leaky roof would need a government-funded emergency grant to get it fixed, and the father without room to plant a garden would need additional food assistance to get the veggies he can no longer trade for.

It's complicated, but can you understand what I'm saying? Poor people who no longer have a community to rely on will inevitably become more and more dependent upon (and therefore more and more vulnerable to the whims of) the government. It will cost everyone more money in the long-run, because the government (a.k.a., YOU) will have to cover the cost of the necessities that poor people are able to cheaply get or trade for within their own communities right now. Not just for the elderly poor, but for ALL of them. Private charity for groups like churches is nice but it's notoriously unreliable, and charity costs money too.

I know that some of you will protest, "But more poor people is NEVER a good thing!" As an ideal, this is true, but as a practicality it's not. The NEED that poor people have to rely upon each other as resources is something that exists right now, and has existed throughout the history of this country and most of humanity's history as well. It's not a brand-new thing. It's not an ideology. It's a tangible reality that's going on all around you, whether you're aware of it or not.

If we take away the ability of the poor to have children, then we take away the resources that the communities of poor people need in order to survive. People gripe about the costs of public assistance NOW; the nation would be screaming wildly at the costs of public assistance in a country where poor people could no longer barter effectively within their own communities due to depopulation. The tax costs of providing every cent of care for the elderly poor would be astronomical too, and might very well break the middle class, which is more connected to the working class than it cares to admit.

I'm all for discouraging poor parents from having too MANY children, but that's not what I'm hearing. I'm hearing that poor people shouldn't have any children AT ALL, because "nobody should have children that they can't afford to care for themselves." This is a shortsighted and selfish idea to possess; an idea that assumes that the only consequence will be less poverty. I don't think that's true. I think that if the poor stop having any children at all, the costs of supporting the poor would shatter the middle class and then THEY'D become the "new poor."

If we want to decrease poverty, there are better, smarter ways to go about doing it than advocating to limit the reproductive rights of the poor. Raising the top income tax rate would help fund social programs, which in turn help to relieve poverty. A return of manufacturing jobs would probably help more than anything. Low-income people need jobs that actually pay enough to support their families without requiring college degrees, and that means factory and mill jobs. Increased community information about and access to birth control and abortion services, so that poor people can choose to have their children during one of their lives' economic "hills" rather than "valleys" would help, too. The most important thing to focus on is this: any over-arching plan to decrease the population of poor people MUST be large enough and well-funded enough to help the vast, vast majority of poor people at the same time, so that the reduction of community resources coincides with a reduction in the NEED for those resources. If we reduce the number of people within the poor community without reducing the NEED that poor people have for their poor-community resources, then we are going to inflict an enormous amount of suffering on both the poor AND the middle class.

I know this has been rather rambling--I'm thinking as I type--but I do want to point out one more thing. The idea that the working poor are insulated and have little to no effect on the middle and upper classes is a dangerous and false idea. We are ALL connected. The status of poor families affects the status of middle-class families affects the status of upper-class families, and so on. The only people who are "insulated" are the super-wealthy who have so much money that even an economic crash doesn't threaten their physical comfort; so much wealth that they could withdraw from society completely and be perfectly fine for the rest of their lives. You have to understand that whatever you inflict upon the poor has a direct effect on YOU as well, and that effect is not always what you thought it would be. A change as enormous and vital as the reproduction of an entire class of people is going to cause tidal waves of change in the middle class too, and if those changes are negative rather than positive, it would take generations--literally--to fix the situation and make it right. Generations of people suffering enormously because some of us fell prey to judgemental, short-sighted thinking and "simple" black-and-white answers that turned out to cause more problems than they solved.

America's middle class: we low-income people are not aliens, or animals, or disconnected faceless numbers. We are YOU--just with less money and different resource priorities. We love our children as much as you love yours, and need them perhaps even more because we are less able to stand alone than you are. Work WITH us to decrease suffering. Don't inflict things upon us "for our own good." Poor does not equal stupid, no matter WHAT certain people say. Consider that maybe, just maybe, WE might be the ones who know best what's "for our own good." A healthy working class is vital to the nation that is literally built upon our backs. Compromising the structural integrity of the working class could be a disaster for everyone, including you.
 

The mind of a moonbat.   

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