One time when I was in college I was traveling in Tennessee on I-75 when traffic came to complete standstill somewhere north of Knoxville. As it happened, I came to a stop a few yards from an exit. So, I pulled out my trusty Rand McNally atlas and discovered that I could follow some serpentine county road that would dump me back on I-75 ten or fifteen miles down the line, and hopefully beyond the source of the traffic jam. Thus, I had my introduction to the people of the Cumberland Mountains. As I wound my way along the county road, I saw some truly shocking poverty. People were living in shacks and homes that looked uninhabitable. Garbage was strewn across people’s unkempt yards. Rusted out cars sat on cinder blocks and hound dogs lazed on porches that sometimes came up to within a few feet of the road. Many people who looked like they came straight of the movie Deliverance sat on those porches on disgusting weathered couches sipping lemonade or iced tea in the heat of the working day. It didn’t look like too many of those people had jobs. And, if they did, they didn’t pay much. Almost of all them had to be on government assistance of some sort or another. And, yet, most of these shacks and ramshackle homes were equipped with satellite dishes. And not the small ones we have now, but gigantic ones the size of a VW Bus. I remember thinking to myself that it was messed up that all these welfare recipients who couldn’t spare a dime for keeping up their homes had found several hundreds of dollars to buy access to television. And, I guess I haven’t mentioned it, but all these people were white.
They were white but they pretty much exactly fit the description that conservatives reserve for blacks who they term “welfare queens” who just “want free stuff” while they tool around in their Escalades sporting their gold teeth. Republicans love to criticize anyone who receives government assistance if they also have a cell phone or granite countertops or anything nice. It’s an annoying trait.
In any case, I was reminded of this by reading this piece at Gateway Pundit and, especially, the comment thread that followed. The basic complaint is simple. The government is taking money they didn’t need to use for keeping people from freezing to death last winter and using it buy air conditioners for people at risk of dying of heat stroke or respiratory failure this summer.
Free air conditioners for the poor!! What’s next? Free cars?
The article features a photograph of an overweight black woman in a wheelchair. Her name is Rhoda Lee, and she is not a recipient of a free air conditioner. She is a board member of the Lorain County Community Action Agency, which is implementing the program. Nonetheless, the comment thread is dedicated to abusing her for being an overweight “portch” monkey. And, of course, there are more comments directed at blacks in general and also Latinos. For example:
One of our friends works as a teacher in primarily a hispanic/black neighborhood. ALL the children are on the free lunch program. Most of the parents drive luxury
SUV’s.
Yes, that HAS to be true because we all know that all blacks and hispanics are drug dealers, right?
But it’s not just the casual uncontested racism that is noteworthy about these right-wing sites and their commenters. It’s their uniform disdain for common sense things like using available money in the budget to help people stay alive in 100-plus degree heat.
The only sense of community these people have is for the community of people who resent being part of a community and reject the idea that that places any obligations on them.
But if they want to see some truly lazy-ass people who are literally living off the government teat while lazing around on couches sipping iced tea and watching Oprah, they should go visit the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. They’ll find a lot more of them there than they will in our inner cities.
