Tag Archives: poverty

Can We Fix What’s Broken Here?

Posted by alienredqueen on

This is about more than just mass shootings.  This is about how sick our society has become, and it’s not because of violent video games or music, or “lack of prayer in school,” or even “broken families” or “millennial entitlement (lawd knows there is plenty of entitlement on all sides.)

For those of you who may think I am talking out of my ass (so I have been told recently, and by someone who was actually talking out their ass), I actually did study some of this stuff in school and hold a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology as well as Sociology, with a concentration on Criminal Justice.  My point is, I am simply asking for a little faith, or at least forbearance, that my opinion is somewhat informed.

So…

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So let’s start by addressing this meme… or rather what this meme doesn’t say.

“Throughout Canadian history, the social policy framework has been composed of efforts to address the sociopolitical rights of marginalized segments of the population (such as laborers, Aboriginal people and other visible minority populations, women, disabled people, and sexual minorities), along with addressing the negative conditions in which people live through the creation of national and provincial programs of social support (such as community programs of support directed toward new immigrants or disabled people) and economic support (such as unemployment insurance or family allowance payments)” (source) Oxford research encyclopedias
Basically, it seems their government has always tried to lift people up instead of keeping people separate. I really feel like we need a multi-part solution to this mass shooting issue. Studies show that if guns are available, they will be more likely to be used. So, first, we don’t want angry, frustrated, or violent mentally ill people to be able to access them as readily as they can, while we fix the other issues.  It’s common sense, really.  You don’t hand pissed off people large mag weapons.
But more importantly, we need a political and social system built on lifting our whole society up and unifying them, instead of dividing them for the benefit of the oligarch.  People will always compete for resources; it’s human nature.  But it is not intractable! And the social structure of a society makes a difference.

 For this reason, there is a tendency to attribute wars to “primordial” ethnic passions, which makes them seem intractable. This view is not correct, however, and diverts attention from important underlying economic and political factors.

Although a person’s culture is partly inherited it is also constructed and chosen, and many people have multiple identities.2(source) NIH

With a small percentage of the population controlling most of the wealth  (namely big business and politicians), they then toss their scraps into the ring and the rest of us fight over them.  Maybe if we weren’t fighting for scraps, we would feel a little more generous and have a little more room for compassion and consideration for those less fortunate.  Maybe we’d be less frustrated, less likely to look to one another for someone to blame or resent.

Group motivation hypothesis—Since intra-state wars mainly consist of fighting between groups, group motives, resentments, and ambitions provide motivation for war. Groups may be divided along cultural or religious lines, by geography, or by class. Group differences only become worth fighting for, however, if there are other important differences between groups, particularly in the distribution and exercise of political and economic power. (source) NIH
It has long been acknowledged in social sciences that it is poverty, not race or other facts, have a significant effect on crime, and many, many books have been written on the subject.  It’s the reason “ghettos” exist in most cities and states regardless of the demographics.
So in summation, if we want to tackle the issues of violence and social injustice in our country, first we need to loosen the financial stranglehold on our people, and contrary to what the current administration suggests, this is not done by giving corporations tax breaks, cutting welfare for poor people, or denying affordable healthcare (especially mental healthcare) to millions of Americans.  It is not done by controlling who prays where or what bathrooms people use.  It is not done by ignoring social injustices or calling people “snowflakes.”  I think we’ll only be able to do it if we all accept that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and take steps to fundamentally change how our government works, from the kleptocracy it has become, to once again being by the people, for the people. 
Please, if you have any hope for our nation to heal, think about it.

The Impoverished American Mind

Posted by alienredqueen on

I get tired of hearing people bitch about how they “support” people on welfare.
SO I researched it…. On ONE website, I read it’s about a dime a day (I don’t know how he arrived at that figure, but what a commenter said on the topic was priceless:)

And I quote: “I’d pay two dimes if it makes some conservatard stop crying.” (Excuse the use of the insensitive suffix…)

One source has this handy pie chart, and asserts:

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A slew of other government programs get a lot less in tax dollars than you might think, Kramer adds. For instance, the hot-button social program welfare gets just a fraction of a penny of every income tax dollar—about .59 cents—and foreign aid and diplomacy account for just 1.2 cents.

Did you know that in order for someone to receive SNAP benefits, their gross monthly income generally must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line, or $2,069 (about $24,800 a year) for a three-person family in fiscal year 2013.
Furthermore, even before Obamacare, if you had health insurance, guess what you were doing: supporting other people! Most people in general good health will not use the amount of services to equal the premiums they pay in. Health care reform actually dictates that you start receiving a portion of unused premiums back, but people are still complaining. Any insurance works the same way. The car insurance you pay every month is going towards paying for other people’s accidents… You have insurance “in case” you get in an accident. I doubt you get much of your premium back for the year if you have no accidents.

Also, why do people bitch about welfare, when we are also paying so our representatives and officials can have vacation houses?  We’ll call people we don’t even know “lazy” and “moochers,” but our taxes go in larger part to paying about a bazillion other things with which we’d probably not personally agree.

Suffice it to say, most of our income tax money does NOT go to supporting the poor. It goes to the government, the military (and yet they are cutting our soldiers’ lunches?) The goverment spends six times the money on paying interest on the national debt  than they do on education.  If you really want to complain about not paying someone else’s bills, think about that.  And if you can’t afford ten cents out of your check to help poor people (not everyone abuses welfare), then maybe you should be worried more about your impoverished sense of empathy and morality.

So can we stop selectively bitching about poor people?

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