Last night, I read South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer's feelings about poor people and was confused.
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better,” Bauer said. [...]
I wasn't confused about what Mr. Bauer was saying, I have read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* after all, but I was confused about why he thought it might be a good idea to say that in public. I mean, he said, in public, that feeding the hungry is bad. He implied that the solution to poverty is to kill the poor. Who hears that and is not appalled?
Well, thanks to google reader, now I know. I Have a Dream** by blackandgoldfan.
I have a dream that one day all citizens will earn the fruits of this great nation. With freedom comes great responsibility to respect one's uniqueness in this world. There are those in this society who feel entitled to the prosperity of another, and, as free human beings, we must not stand for the theft by government to give to the idle and irresponsible. The slaves of the system have defined "entitlement" for far too long. Liberty dies a slow death under these circumstances.
It's more subtle than Mr. Bauer's stray animal speech, but it's the same ideology. . . . those in this society who feel entitled to the prosperity of another doesn't refer to the military-industrial complex or politicians who receive, on my dime, a level of health care I'll never see. No, those are poor people. Those are children who receive free lunches at school (and don't eat much on weekends). Those are adults who work for minimum wage, which just doesn't cover food and shelter. Those are the disabled who must rely on government programs for health care, food and shelter. Those are leeches on the body politic, rats breeding out of control. Those are vermin who should be exterminated.
Just so we can be clear on the vermin people like bngfan and Bauer are perfectly okay with, in fiscal year 2002, the US spent $18.2 billion dollars in food stamp benefits. The US spent $10 billion a month on the war in Iraq. A month. That means that we were spending as much in 2 months on a war that had no reasonable basis as we were on feeding people for an entire year. That's okay. Feeding the hungry is not.
Just for the record, I don't feel entitled to anyone's prosperity. If you have money, good for you. If you have a nice house and a nice car and take nice vacations every year, good for you. However, I don't think your vacations are more important than starving children.
*I am not Godwining my own post. That is almost word for word Nazi rhetoric concerning Jews and other "undesirables".
**White people editing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s seminal speech to make points exactly opposite what Dr. King was fighting for make me very angry.
