Apparently I’m Now a Socialist
And you are, too. Guilty as charged.
After reading Jessica Wildfire’s article, “It’s Time for all the Highly Successful People to Come Clean,” it struck me how difficult it is for so many White people to confront their privilege, even those I would not describe as “highly successful.” This was never a problem for me. My parents, both child survivors of the Great Depression, never hesitated for one instant to remind us how privileged and lucky we were to eat three square meals a day.
The problem with most privileged people is that they know no different. Those few who once tasted poverty delude themselves into believing their success is a direct result of hard work and super powers, perhaps combined with their supreme genetics. The favorite intellectual binky of the privileged is the Welfare Mom. She is the woman depicted as too dumb to understand how babies are made, too slutty to care, or too lazy to get off her back and get a real job instead of cashing her dependents in for welfare checks. Non-White men caught on video hauling TVs out of the flooded or rioted department stores are another favorite symbol, conjured up right behind Welfare Mom as the ultimate result of a society built on government assistance.
These unicorns of the underprivileged cause tremendous internal conflict in those with a belief system steeped in privilege, faith, and (almost always) racism. Listen to most Republicans discussing the topic and the conversation immediately regresses to name-calling and ends abruptly with the get-out-of-jail-free-superficially-non-racist defense that “help” is the slippery slope to Socialism. Support a platform that advocates for government assistance to any sector of society and the Right will swiftly paint you as their next-favorite intellectual binky: the Socialist.
Is there any Republican left standing who is willing to accept the possibility that some lesser-privileged souls will never have the means to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” without some form of help? And that, if not for our faith than for our humanity, we distinguish ourselves from lower life forms by a fundamental obligation to help those less fortunate? And if we can start from that line in the sand, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that some of these souls (regardless of skin color) must still have a life worth living? And once we are holding hands and singing Kumbaya as conspirators in your new definition of Socialism, can we create a system of assistance that does not inevitably lead to a society of unambitious do-nothings who lay around all day long sucking at the government teat?
If so, we are all in perfect agreement that assistance in some form is necessary and essential, and the only economic levers devised thus far for funding such a system are charities, taxation (in free democracies), communism, and slavery. Call me woke, but if we’re all willing to rule out the latter two options, it seems to me the means are inevitable and we must all pay for the freedoms they confer. Time to grow up, put away the binkies, and confront your cognitive dissonance. We can all be in this together and still be individuals.
