You Like?I’m not even sure how coherent this ends up being – I am having a very bad brain-fog day and it has taken HOURS to write. But, here goes.
Today, I saw a conversation between a family (the father is disabled and they are living in extremely difficult conditions) and numerous others on Twitter – most notably, Demi Moore taking them to task for their criticism of celebrities who flaunt wealth and fame. Effectively, Mrs. Kutcher told them not to be mean but then changed her tune when she realized the circumstances were more complex than the conclusion she immediately jumped to (which is, by default: “Hey, just because we’re celebrities doesn’t mean you can criticize us”).
Of course, being twitter, this unleashed a shitstorm of messages attacking the poor folks with remarkably enlightened messages like “Get a job” and “Stop whining, things are hard for everybody”. Once again, I’m shocked when I realize I have underestimated just exactly how stupid so many people who consider themselves Joe Average can be.
We have this problem in the “First World” – the problem is people do not understand what being poor is in this culture. They see poor as starving children in Africa, or homeless people living in cardboard boxes. They look at television shows like Roseanne and think that’s as poor as you get, and hey – those people laugh and have fun, so it can’t be too bad… In spite of the point of the series being that they were a “working class poor” family, the Conners were rarely portrayed as all that poor. It was just background.
The fact is, being a low-income family in this culture doesn’t always look that much different than being middle-class at times, and that leads to ridiculous prejudice, assumptions and bigotry. Then, there’s the “It could be worse” syndrome that always afflicts those who are better off and choose to lecture… Read the rest of this entry »
