⟦On the American Economy and Structural Oppression⟧
via Facebook
This week, friends and I got into a social media discussion about the implementation of drug testing for welfare recipients. The debate has been raging for some time now, with some cities putting the concept into effect (with dismal results, I might add: in Alabama, only 2% of those tested were found to be active users). Our comments, of course, brought out a White Conservative Facebooker who challenged the idea of there being a need for those in need to go through such rigorous prerequisites in order to receive assistance. After some back and forth, a one Joshua Bartlett posted a meme with a series of statements once falsely attributed to Norman Rockwell, but still a popular internet comeback to the liberal demand for socialist programs like Welfare and Social Security. I decided to take up the challenge of answering these statements, and I now post the results here for you to ponder. Enjoy.
NOTE: The numbered statements are his; the asterisked responses are mine
"A parse, then, Mr. Bartlett:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealth out of prosperity.
**In this country, we have NEVER seen just whether or not that works. We have NEVER been presented with legislation that actually demands the very wealthy and White elite give their actual fair share of what they’ve “earned” in order to help sustain the most poor and marginalized, and if such legislation ever existed, it was shot down immediately, so your point here is moot.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
**The very nature of capitalism negates this entire concept as it pertains to the idea of social welfare and socialist programs. By definition, the biased accumulation of wealth in a free market means that someone, or some group, has been able to bypass the toil and backbreaking work it takes to build up the kind of riches we see being lauded by this society’s top earners. Not only that, they’ve been able to pass it along to their successors, be it their children or other such beneficiaries, instead of utilizing what they’ve bequeathed to benefit the State which allowed them to do this in the first place.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
**You’re absolutely right. Which is why SLAVERY, a Government-sanctioned institution where tortured, oppressed Africans were brutally forced into servitude, working for no pay and negligible human rights, was one of the most successful economic practices for a burgeoning sovereign principality like the nascent United States. White imperial colonizers took EVERYTHING from Black + Brown people, as well as First Nation’s People/Native Americans, in order to cultivate and establish their wealth, their prosperity, and a secure future for their progeny.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
**The concept of justice, for example, in the form of reparations for the descendants of slaves and indigenous people is not about multiplying wealth. Indeed, the nature of a fair and equal distribution of resources has nothing to do with wealth, but rather a reallocation of assets and natural materials that would provide the most marginalized and systematically oppressed in this country with the tools they need to actually cultivate a stable quality of life for themselves in ways that have otherwise been denied them for reasons that include race, gender, orientation, religion, and creed.
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.
**If you are convinced that this is true, then you, Joshua Bartlett, only have YOUR demographic’s predecessors to blame. That this United States of America even exists is the wet dream of a group of miserly elitists who took the opportunity they saw in the discovery + expansion of a “New World,” and made every possible effort to wield that world to their will, at the expense of millions of lives and to the tune of trillions of dollars. If you’re so upset about “half of the people” not pulling their weight, and the end of this nation, then I suggest you grab a time machine, go back a few hundred years, and hit up one of those 18th Century Revolutionary meetings where the Founding Fathers were debating whether or not to abolish slavery and establish a truly egalitarian society (or at least pretend that they would). Tell them to pack up their things, get back on their boats, and go revolt against their oppressors in their European countries of origin, instead of putting people in chains and destroying the land + hard work of people that had no intentions of doing such things to them. Tell them that the misery and subjugation they would levy against countless innocent people, both through bondage and violent prospecting, would ultimately spell the death of the empire so many of them were seeking to create. Tell them that if they knew what was good for them, they’d thank God and the Universe for the positions in which they found themselves, and to keep on the path many of them were determined to follow was a path that would lead their descendants to the very place in which we find ourselves now: at the precipice of the inevitable destruction of a civilization that, by all standards and practices, and for all intents and purposes, is unsustainable.
You tell them that, and see how they respond to you. In the meantime, some of us are trying to get justice and get free, and if you can’t understand that, then YOU, my dear friend, are in the wrong line of discussion, and should probably find something else to do.
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