And being Switzerland, I'm constantly frustrated by how easy it has been to divide us and blind us to our commonalities. Take poverty. Both parties (assuming they are average citizens) would solve the problem once and for all if they could. Poverty is both heartbreaking and a nuisance. It drives down property values, it leads to obesity and malnutrition in the same individual, it pushes up healthcare costs, it leads to more unplanned births. The poorest neighborhoods are eyesores and hotbeds of crime and watching all this suffering take place in our own communities is very depressing indeed. Some are afraid of the crime, the litter blowing around...maybe just the whole thing in general makes them feel uncomfortable. Others take it a little more personally, feeling more sympathy for the underprivileged, uneducated, and the chronically ill lower class. Whoever you are, I doubt you would want poverty to continue if you could choose.
Where we diverge is how we believe we can go about doing this. Generally speaking reps choose tough love. End social programs. Sink or swim. The strongest will survive. Dems choose a more nurturing approach and believe we can make a difference through assisting those who can't help themselves. To my mind, it doesn't matter which way is better. What really needs to be brought to the forefront is this:
Until we can agree, that in order to end poverty we must first identify the cause, we will make no real progress.
It's the same kind of thinking that has led this country down the dark path of over-medication. We simply don't address causes as a people anymore. We prefer band-aids. We like to fix the symptoms but we don't like to think about what might be causing them. We are LAZY thinkers. And although I try to avoid pessimism at all costs, I am disheartened by how ready we all are to disagree with each other, sometimes just for the sake of argument. Even if we do suddenly redevelop our mental muscles and really get to it thinking about what led to poverty in this country to begin with and what factors still contribute, our political habits have our minds entrained to pigeonhole everything and I fear it would be a difficult task to come to any kind of consensus. And to be quite honest, I think it would be difficult to engage the minds of our population in a non-politically aligned activity. We seem to be addicted to this right vs left, this vs that paradigm.
An open mind will be absolutely necessary. We all live here and the world we are currently experiencing as "life in this country" is the cumulative result of 236 years of our "opinions". Opinions are a reflection of worldview and worldview is what ultimately influences actions and creates the reality we experience. It would be tempting to find what seems to be a cause and end the thought process then and there, refusing to consider others' "findings", but I think in order to get a complete view of the issue, a complete review of the populations' opinion on the matter is necessary. I think we need to keep going and asking why, long after we think we've gotten to the bottom of it. For every answer, we should again ask "but why is that the case?" Eventually we will come to an "aha moment" as happens when you apply this same technique to some burning question in your personal life. For an easy example, "Why do I sabotage relationships?" A month later you get to the bottom of it, finally, after scurrying down a psychological rabbit-hole of cause and effect. It's a very useful tool for freeing the psyche from limiting inclinations which leads me to think it would be useful on a larger scale.
Is this possible for an entire nation? And would everyone even care? Or are we too distracted with our own busyness to consider it worth our time and mental effort? One thing seems certain to me. With every tacit decision to ignore the increasing destitution in our country, we gamble with the fate of our own progeny.
3 comments:
A topic near and dear to my heart. I may be skewed to my own lefty ways, but I think that some recent policies proposed by the Dems do address the root causes of poverty.
For one, all women need access to birth control if they want it. The more control we have in planning our families the less children will be born into families who can't afford or aren't ready for babies.
Everyone should have healthcare. If people had access to doctors and medicine, this country would have a decreased rate of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer caught far too late. I have met so many people at the pantries who are there because they are too sick too work which is such a needless thing! Diabetics missing limbs. Women with stage four cancer. Others who faced illness and recovered but the medical bills have buried them. It's ethically wrong to say that the poor and struggling don't deserve healthcare.
Education is the other piece that I think is owned equally by all sides of the political spectrum. It's awful to see people who want to work and improve themselves but can't get the right education to do so. I'm encouraged by some of the public / private partnerships I have seem popping up. When businesses work with schools - particularly community colleges - to design programs to get the workers they need and help fund the process, we all benefit. I am however worried about the bubble being created by student loans for folks going to for profit schools. It's frankly a bit terrifying to think of this bubble bursting and I wish we had much stricter regulations for these programs.
Working in the nonprofit industry has shown me a lot. I get angry when I hear folks talking about how the poor don't want to work or are drug addicts using the system. Some of those exist obviously, but most folks I meet want to work and contribute to society. They are likely to be a bit more beat down and discouraged than most (understandable), but they don't want to be at the soup kitchen or the pantry.
We should be judged as a society by how we treat the least of us. And right now I can't help feeling that there is a huge segment of the country who has stigmatized and practically criminalized the poor so much that they should be ashamed.
Sorry for the rant, but this is a hard one for me to hold back on. Thanks for bringing it up!
Poverty, as with many social situations, has many facets. While I don’t disagree concerning the political nature of the conservative and progress ... I think there’s more of a core value system, something woven into the fabric of being anAmerican that’s of greater significance.
We are a Country of business and commerce and we have always been so oriented. Business drives our society, our politics and just about everything else we touch, think about and do.
Unfortunately, built into our capitalism is the desire for profit. Extending from the profit motive we have seen over and over the equation of cost of labor and materials as the places where bottom line profits can be increased.
Cheap labor and cheap materials are almost a mantra for businesses. Unfortunately, cheap labor has many side effects, poverty being the main one.
In many ways, the dialog between pols on the left and the right, while maybe encouraging, is not the direct route to reducing or eliminating poverty.
Our capitalist system is flawed .... as long as there are fat cats driven by ever increasing profits with no regard for raising up the labor class, we will continue to have impoverished workers and we will perpetuate institutionalized poverty.
We have always been a Nation of have’s and have nots. Good intentions, charity and volunteerism are tiny bandaids, we must, in order to survive as a functioning country, change the ways we do business. Improvements to the socio-economic system (quality of life, education, etc.) will then naturally occur.
This is awesome! I love these responses! Claire I also agree that a society's worth can ultimately be judged by how they treat the least of them. I think we're past the point of most needy people "swimming" if thrown into the sink or swim scenario. The odds are simply stacked against most people and one would need a lot of optimism, creativity, and resourcefulness to beat those odds. Most people don't have a lot of any of those things.
And Bill, it also seems unavoidably obvious to me that profit has become more valued than our humanity. I suspect that's one of the motivating factors for republicans who scoff at environmental initiatives. If they were honest, it would come down to the fact that we simply can't afford to be environmentally ethical.
I would really like the questions to go beyond the birth control and beyond the health and the economic shortcomings. These are all reasons, for sure, but I'm curious...how did we get here? Why is our system so flawed? Was it always heading that way and we just failed to think ahead? Why do people get so sick in this country anyway? Why do the majority of the needy not grow a portion of their own food which is incalculably cheaper than the combined costs of nutritionless food plus the resulting health costs? It's not a judgmental question...the answer may be able to help us solve this food/health problem. It wasn't that long ago that everyone had a garden and held responsibility for providing at least some of their own sustenance. I'm not implying it needs to be this way again, I'm just pointing out that it was a valuable skill supported by a self-reliant viewpoint that doesn't seem as abundant anymore. I'm curious where this got lost.
And why has formal, expensive education become the preferred way to succeed in life? It wasn't always like this. (This is an interesting sidenote by Mike Rowe on the issue...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_pp8CHEQ0) My father is an incredibly intelligent, successful non-college graduate. He's a rare gem who's earned his place in the world through hard work and yet stories such as his are becoming increasingly rare. As the value of education rises, the value of experience without that pricey piece of paper to go along with it drops. Affordable education would solve this, but why is it so important to make people do this anyway? If the experience is there as a solid foundation, it seems an odd idea that someone should be forced to go into debt just to prove their competence.
And I'm REALLY curious about what motivates people to value profit over people. It's not just the oligarchs that do this. The average small town citizen (in Ohio at least) does exactly the same thing when they choose cheap Chinese crap from Walmart over quality handmade goods made locally. I've beat this drum to these folks giving them all the reasons in the world why it would benefit them and their community to invest their money locally rather than in a corporation. And nobody wants to hear it. It's not that there's any sort of flaw to my logic, they just don't care. What motivates people to not care about such things? What are they caring about instead? And why?
I like to know what makes people tick. When we find out what's motivating them, we can steer society in a common direction that will benefit everyone.
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