You’d think that rich people, particularly those who were born into their riches, would look around at their riches and think to themselves that life would kind of be hard without all their riches.
What they actually think is that it would be totally easy to have no money because they’d just get fat on free government cheese.
We can eat cake. But how about they spend a weekend on the street with no cell phone, credit cards, or cash of any kind?
You know, how about they test out their theory that everyone is on Easy Street?
Government will pay for a free cell phone with 150 monthly minutes if you are on food stamps. saw in in a TV commercial for the company supplying the phones.
It’s a lot easier to live guilt free when you ‘know’ the people who might need your help, and especially your tax dollars, actually have it pretty easy.
After all, we’re good people, if the poor people needed our help (and our tax dollars) we’d help them. But lucky for them, they don’t need any help, it’s pretty easy for them. And if that saves me a few bucks and saves me a whole lot of guilt, that”s just a bonus.
Also, too, I’m not a racist for thinking that the poor that don’t have it easy deserve their fate because they are lazy and shiftless or did something else wrong (selling loosies or jaywalking) that caused them to be rightly punished.
Plenty of middle income people feel that way, too, anecdotally speaking.
I know many people who are so against $15/hour for flipping burgers because they’re classist assholes.
“$15/hour is almost what I make, and I have a real job!”
Just once, I’d love to see someone ask these set-upon rich people why they still have jobs if they genuinely believe it’s better to be poor. It’s exceedingly simple to become poor: simply quit your job, give your stuff away, and donate your bank account to charity. Soon you, too, can luxuriate in the splendor of a few bucks a day worth of food stamps and a mere 5-10 year wait for subsidized housing. Is it really too much to ask that, in addition to pumping out the quarterly “woe upon the poor destitute soul who must live in Manhattan on a mere $500k salary” garbage, the NYT could ask one single rich person why they keep being rich if it’s really so amazing to be poor.
I continue to feel that empathy is the single greatest creator of “liberals”. Not necessarily sympathy, because if you drag a bleeding body before a conservative they will help that person.
But the abstract empathy for humanity as a whole…that’s where progressive impulses come from.
My experience is that most everyone is capable of empathy. It is just that, for some, there can be conditions attached. And that seems to be where many conservatives fall. I think it is simply a combination of how their brains are wired and the cultural influences that are present around them. I’ve seen great empathy exhibited by conservative friends. But it really has a different feel, at times. I don’t quite know how to categorize it. But empathy among my liberal friends tends to be a more default kind of response, while with conservative friends, it often seems to have to pass through some sort of internal tribal filter before being expressed in a tangible way.
I’ve been struggling for quite a while with how to put this phenomenon into words, and you’ve done it beautifully. Thanks.
I think about this kind of a shit a lot….much to the chagrin of my poor wife.
Speaking in gross generalities, conservatives seem to have a brand of empathy that is triggered mainly when something affects them or someone close to them directly and are unable to feel it in any more abstract way. On the other side of the spectrum, liberals are able to easily feel empathy abstractly, but sometimes can have trouble connecting it with individuals they know.
how one learns to relate to others in childhood has tremendous impact and is difficult to alter later in life.
they couldn’t make it 1 week as a poor person
In a Doonesbury strip, Jane Fonda’s maid says to Jane Fonda:
“You’re busy because you want to be. I’m busy because I have to be.”
…then why aren’t more rich people ditching their wealth and their troubles and voluntarily entering the easy life of poverty?
That’s the funny thing about wealth. While most poor people have no ability to make themselves rich, rich people have the ability to make themselves poor by giving away their wealth. If the poor life really were better, rich people’s behavior would be a lot different.
As I see it, at issue is the fact that everyone has their own problems and people don’t spend enough time visualizing what it’s truly like to live in a different economic class of the social ecosystem.
Rich people do have problems, and it’s easy to see that many of their problems don’t apply to poor people. So it’s easy for a rich someone to think that poor people have it easy because poor people will never experience those particular sets of problems. Similarly, it is easy for a poor someone to think that rich people don’t have any problems, because most of the poor person’s problems can be solved with money (the acquisition of which will of course will bring on other problems).
What people need to try to understand is that a host of problems come with either having money or not having it. The problems that come with not having it are at a more fundamental level of existence, which is why it is usually easier for empathetic people to relate to the problems of poor people.
In general, I think we’d come a long way if everyone would just understand that everyone else is just like them : dealing with their own personal brand of shit. And maybe if we all pay it forward in the ways we can, when we can, we can help someone else’s personal brand of shit become a little less shit, expecting that at some point, karma will re-balance things back into our favor and help with our shit too.
At least, that’s what I think.