The Tragic Death of FEELING SHAME (a politics forum rant)
Society has a serious problem with what I will refer as "entitlement culture." We see it in the media, on the Internet, and our everyday lives. The United States was built and has prospered on the idea that anybody, not just the privileged nobles at the top, can make it, as long as a person is willing to devote time and effort to work, develop their talents, and do the right things. I graduated from high school twenty years ago, and that was certainly something that was taught back then, so it was not that long ago. Today, it seems like all we see and hear is the complete opposite.
There is an attitude that has infiltrated the American psyche (and probably outside of America as well) that you should not have to work hard. That people that do all the wrong things deserve the same things as the people that do all the right things. That the people that do the right things are only able to do so because of privilege, so there is no point in trying to do the right things, as it would be futile to do so for somebody that is (supposedly) lacking "privilege."
This attitude has led to what I will call THE LACK OF SHAME. There used to be a point, it was within all of our lifetimes, that people felt shame for doing traditionally shameful things. Begging for money on a street corner was once seen as shameful. Falling behind on your rent and being evicted was once seen as shameful. Being chronically unemployed was once seen as shameful. It seems to me that the opposite is the case today.
This idea has been percolating in my head for a while, but it boiled over a couple of nights ago when I saw a certain GoFundMe. This person is a government employee and was asking for money to buy a house. I don't want to link to the page, as I don't want to dox anybody, but the basic points were:
(1) She is a government employee, which is a low paying job.
(2) She has massive amounts of credit card debt. Like close to $50K.
(3) She is single.
(4) She had cancer a few years ago, for which she started another GoFundMe back then. She says she is doing okay now on the page.
(5) She is in her 50s, and the only way that she will ever be able to retire is if she buys a house. She can't buy a house because of her low pay and because she is single. She wants to retire when she is 62, and needs your help to do it.
I was particularly offended when I saw this GoFundMe, as you can look up her situation on the Internet almost instantly. Her salary is publicly available, and is over $125K a year. She has a Patreon, which gets her another $1,500 a month. She has publicly posted about having her student loans forgiven, thanks to the public service loan forgiveness program. If this the kind of person that should be publicly begging for money?
I don't know if the act of begging for money by itself is a huge problem for society. We constantly are asked to donate money every single time we check out at any retail store, as if the company can't donate their own money to a charity. I have seen a rise in requests for tips for things that have never been tip-worthy before; I have been given prompts to tip at a self-checkout kiosk. The constant and pervasive begging for money is a symptom of something larger: people just do not feel shame anymore. We were once expected to work for what we had, and we were allowed to feel proud for earning what we had. Nowadays it is the complete opposite: it is totally alright for somebody, even upper middle class people, to beg for money. On the other hand, if somebody worked for their lot in life, it is just because of blind luck, so that person should be guilted into giving away their money.
My purpose in typing this out is to see if I am the only that that feels this way. I have a feeling that this will get a lot of pushback on this forum, which would be great. I would really like to be convinced that I am wrong and overreacting to something that is not quite as serious as the amount of time this has been on my head suggests.
Confucius say, "Overlook your own opportunity by being tactful."
Spoiler
so many fox news threads. so little time.
people older than 35 or so aren't dealing with the "everyone has a camera on their phone and the ability to go viral" age very well..
you see significantly more one off events, and boomer brain makes us thing it must be happening more than that one specific anecdotal time because it went viral on social media..
all of this **** is just the kitty litter in highschools/drugs in the halloween candy/kids eating tidepods facebook chain email over and over again.
eta- we're also awful on realizing and understand most of the **** we see on social media as "candid" is staged for clicks..
No. My friends wife is a teacher from 2 towns over and her school had to install litter boxes because the administration allows students to identify as cats.
So the reason that people are more willing to be parasites is because "capitalism bad?" Has there ever been a period in American history where the economy has been more robust than from 2010 to the present?
No. I can't tell whether you're intentionally reducing my post to an oversimplified point I didn't make. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and respond.
I think it depends on what we mean by "robust." Income and wealth inequality have both been on the rise since the 1970s. I haven't read this article in detail, but from a quick skim it appears to include a good analysis of this trend: (https://www.cbpp.org/research/a-guide-to...). Economic mobility is also down. (See https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck...)
Much more important for my point is that the perception of equal economic opportunity is way down. (See, e.g. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/publ...). If you spend any time on Reddit, you can get a pretty good anecdotal sense of how that userbase, which skews younger, feels about their prospects for upward mobility.
One way to measure whether the economy is "robust" is to purely look at growth or GDP. We can also look at unemployment rates, inflation, etc. A good argument can be made that a "robust" economy should be measured more holistically, with an eye toward whether and to what extent it is leaving people behind.
But in any case, my point was never "cap bad." It's that we have a lot of people in American society who cannot afford unexpected bills, and now the ability to ask for help is a GoFundMe page away. Of course we are going to see people availing themselves of that.
If you are making over $100K and are somehow still living paycheck to paycheck, whose fault is that? What point is it that you are trying to make, exactly? Do you even have a point?
my question would be who cares.. who is more of a "parasite" the person with a gofundme or the person "working" 50 hours a week tricking old people into signing up for reverse mortgages or predatory life insurance?
Yeah I felt like pre internet boomers just minded their own business more. Now it’s scrolling looking for things that don’t matter to be offended by.
If you are making over $100K and are somehow still living paycheck to paycheck, whose fault is that? What point is it that you are trying to make, exactly? Do you even have a point?
If half the people are in that boat, then maybe it goes beyond the whole personal problem thing and something else is going on.
50% is indicative to me. Maybe your number is higher.
One thought to add to my prior posts. There is probably something to be said here about the decline of community. In the past, when someone needed more help than their family could provide, they could turn to community memberships for assistance (think here, neighbors, religious group). For better or worse and for reasons we don't need to debate, we live in an increasingly individual/atomic society. So, when people need help, you can expect they are going to reach out to the only network they have left (social media). It's not that people never asked for help before, but it was done in a less public way.
Sick rant. Mike Pence couldn't have said it better himself.
Let's put all of that nonsense aside. The problem is quite simple. The superrich hoard all the money; other people can't afford to live a full life, and so they need to do stuff beyond their job to attempt to survive and thrive.
Many of the people who ask for money certainly FEEL SHAME about it but have no other recourse within our economic system. We could snap our fingers and fix this **** with heavily increased taxes on the ultrarich and the military-industrial complex... but that, of course, would lessen the wealth of the top .1%, a fate worse than death for some of these Scrooges. And that's why a more equitable economy can only be done through legislation/taxation; these ghouls aren't gonna just give their money away.
Bill Gates has pledged, on multiple occasions, to give most of his wealth away, to the point where he would fall off the Forbes' Rich Douchebag list (he mentioned this explicitly). Since the time he started with this PR nonsense for gullible rubes, his wealth has in fact increased dramatically, going over the 100B mark. I mean, from his perspective, I get it, every time he makes yet another allusion to giving his wealth out, he is met with all sorts of credulous articles gleefully discussing all the great stuff we're gonna do with that money! https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/15/bill-gat...
No. My friends wife is a teacher from 2 towns over and her school had to install litter boxes because the administration allows students to identify as cats.
Yeah I felt like pre internet boomers just minded their own business more. Now it’s scrolling looking for things that don’t matter to be offended by.
What a delightful exchange!! You can't draw it up any cleaner than that.
(sorry to end the charade, but to Bundy5 -- ecriture is sarcastically referring to some bit of right-wing culture-war idiocy as one of the things that people "look for... that don't matter to be offended by" -- whereupon you immediately gave an example of you doing exactly that!)
So the reason that people are more willing to be parasites is because "capitalism bad?" Has there ever been a period in American history where the economy has been more robust than from 2010 to the present?
It looks like you measure "how good is our economy?" by the metrics of the ownership class. Stock market, unemployment numbers, etc. If you look at it from the perspective of a typical worker, the economy is far less robust than it appears to the owner. Despite the fact that profits in many corporate arenas are continuing to skyrocket, workers' salary has remained shockingly flat in comparison. Income inequality continues to widen. Industrial towns are hollowed out. Mass poverty is found out in the country, too, and the remaining citizens are living lives of desperation.
Indeed, to a large degree, "the reason that people are more willing to be parasites" is "capitalism bad". The gig-economification of the US and the capitalist world at large leads to far more people working as a type of independent contractor, playing the game for themselves, without any of the protections or benefits that an organized group of workers can typically achieve. Look at how DoorDash/GrubHub/Uber work and get back to me.
We don't even have a real federal minimum wage right now. I mean, we technically do have a pathetic and unworkable minimum salary of $7.25/hour, but they leave that **** largely to the states; different states set their effective minimum wage.
Everybody is out there by themselves, hacking their way through the jungle, hoping not to fall prey to an apex capitalist.
Some of you need to seek out and talk to some teachers before you spout off on this being all smoke and mirrors or social media hype.
There may not be many litter boxes in the bathrooms, but a ton of these kids have absolutely no shame whatsoever, and the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
You have entire school districts dropping graduation requirements to mask the shitshow that has become education in certain American locales. Not only are these kids unashamed of being illiterate into their late teens, but they'll knock you the **** out if you make them ponder the consequences, and then when you call home to discuss it with the parent, you'll get another earful because said parent is unashamed and unconcerned with the product put out by their household.
You don't need any money to instill basic common decency into your kids or to encourage them to sit down and pay attention in school so they can climb higher than you did on the socioeconomic ladder.
Some of you need to seek out and talk to some teachers before you spout off on this being all smoke and mirrors or social media hype.
There may not be many litter boxes in the bathrooms, but a ton of these kids have absolutely no shame whatsoever, and the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
You have entire school districts dropping graduation requirements to mask the shitshow that has become education in certain American locales. Not only are these kids unashamed of being illiterate into their
So, why do you think these parents have failed so deeply to raise their kids properly (according to you)? Do you think that they have, like, a bad spirit, a rotten soul, or something? No. The majority of the "problem children" you refer to live in poverty. Their caretakers are worked to the bone just to provide a meager standard of living (and some cannot even achieve that). They are provided completely insufficient help from the state or anybody else to achieve financial stability. Financial considerations for so-called low-level or unskilled workers have not remotely been kept in-line with the rewards doled out to the owners. All of these social ills to which you refer are borne from POVERTY. P-O-V-E-R-T-Y. Eliminate poverty and watch these problems almost completely fade away.
All of your cultural explanations for this are completely swallowed up by the monster that is society-wide poverty.
You say "speak to some teachers". Well, I've listened to interviews of multiple teachers of inner-city areas, particularly from the Chicago-area teachers union (can't be bothered to look up their actual name atm), amongst other places, and they tend to say a variation of what I wrote above. I guess those are the wrong teachers to listen to, and instead we need to only listen to the wife of an assistant to the landlord.
because said parent is unashamed and unconcerned with the product put out by their household.
Capitalistic thinking through and through... thinking of a child as a "product". Gross.
I mean, I understand that THOSE teachers are the ones sitting on top of all that Union graft and corruption; working the system to unfairly advocate for a living wage for instructors, sitting high on the hog of their optimistically 30k/year PLUS BENEFITS salary, so, you know, the stuff they say doesn't count, but work with me here.
While you live in your fantasy land, another generation of children will reach adulthood without even an elementary-level education and a complete lack of self control or respect for authority.
Poverty is a great scapegoat until you realize that everything about the educational system is free. All a kid has to do is show up and sit relatively still for 6 hours a day. It's a very low bar, and some refuse to jump it. Anyone who does take on the hurdle is dragged down by the miscreants among their peer group, and even sometimes called out as a traitor to the cause. How dare they try and better themselves.
You're also being a real ******* here by ignoring the countless impoverished families who are instilling some positive values and ideals into their kids. They must not have received the memo.
the people who make 100k are pretty much successful tho. they already did all that. they outplayed and overcame like 90% of their peers. so I think theres a disconnect here.
You're also being a real ******* here by ignoring the countless impoverished families who are instilling some positive values and ideals into their kids. They must not have received the memo.
Right. Rural America has really been thriving over these last 30 years and has become a bastion of "positive vales".
