But I Will Try…

In response to ‘I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People’.

The people that I speak to are not as callous as this article suggests, but there are two things they believe, which I do not:

1) People can always make their own way if they are good and work hard.

2) The government shouldn’t ask for anymore money from the rest of us.

In response to #1, all I can say is that is that you have to take an objective look at the privileges you were born with first before you indict anyone else. They are EXTREMELY HARD TO SEE, especially if you don’t fall into any minority category. When your personhood is ALWAYS assumed, it is, I repeat, EXTREMELY HARD TO SEE what it’s like for people who are denigrated or void of opportunity because of their identity. You cannot look at a black girl who grew up in a town where the water was poisoned with lead, where the police were more likely to shoot her than protect her, in an education system that has no interest in her success, with parents who have no money, and with no nearby examples of a truly “successful” adult, and compare them to the achievements of a middle class white boy in the suburbs. You just can’t. For both of them to wind up in the same place by the time they are 18, the boy would merely have to be TOTALLY AVERAGE and the girl would have to be EXTRAORDINARY. (And sadly, in this scenario, that extraordinary girl will still have to fight 10x harder to prove herself from 18 on than that completely average boy). Go into every neighborhood that seems scary. There are children in there. And the only ones who will get out are the most extraordinary ones unless we do something to change their starting circumstances. And if you think only the most extraordinary people DESERVE to live or get out of those circumstances, then yeah, this article is for you. I can’t explain why you need to care about these people.

Now, are there people who abuse the system? Yes. Are they living their best life? No. Are they all cumulatively leeching a substantial amount of money out of our overall taxes to pay for a life of leisure? No. I know that there is fear of living off the government being so easy that everyone does it. I just don’t feel this is a legitimate fear. People are curious and want to build and create. We want movies so we’ll make movies. We want to drive places and fly places so we’ll continue to build and improve these vehicles. We want so we will create. You don’t need to incentivize people with insane, astronomical, unspendable amounts of money to make them not die of laziness. I am completely willing to take this bet. As evidenced by the fact that some of our most important, infrastructural jobs don’t pay shit and people still do them like goddamn heroes. Let’s hear each other out, recognize everyone’s humanity, and nurture everyone because that is how we will gain all that we can from our collective minds. In truth, an innovation is really humanity’s innovation that first escaped out of one person.

Here’s another mind game to consider. If you have 10 people fighting for a turkey leg, one will win ALWAYS and nine will lose ALWAYS because there is one turkey leg. Now you could tell them, as individuals, to work train more and fight harder. But if all 10 work harder, STILL only one person can ever have the turkey leg, bootstraps be damned. In our world, you start out way closer to that turkey leg if you’re a cis, white, man. Especially if you’re wealthy. Period. And I know it’s so FUCKING OFFENSIVE when we ever ever EVER suggest that white men didn’t work hard. I’m not saying that all people don’t have trials. But you didn’t work hard BECAUSE you are white, cis, male, or wealthy. You worked hard because life is work. But everyone else adds the work of trying to be seen as human, or trying to fill the few prescribed spaces made for us — the “token minority.”

In response to #2, I know it FEELS like the politicians themselves are getting our tax money and wasting it. But MOSTLY it’s the government getting that money. There is NO other entity that we all pay into and therefore there is NO ONE ELSE to protect us against the power and greed of corporations who only account to their shareholders or themselves. The are ONLY held responsible by the government. If we break the government or refuse to fund it, there is NOTHING stopping corporations from poisoning us, from ruining the Earth, from even taking your house or firing you for no reason. We must fund the Government. And the ONLY way to get rid of corrupt politicians is to be more engaged in politics all the time. WE hold them accountable by our votes. If we don’t… we get what we just got. A government we don’t expect to trust. A government full of proven liars. A government that blatantly works for the individual self-interest of those in power and their few donors. That’s our fault. Scrapping the whole system to save a bit of taxes will only make us more vulnerable in the future. For every $300* I save at the end of the year, the Walton’s get $10 billion* (*not actual numbers). And we all have weaker institutions and less funding for quintessential societal needs like testing food, drugs and various chemicals we throw into the atmosphere for poison, and managing our water and roads, and even collecting taxes.

I can tell you what will happen if these Republican lawmakers (or more accurately, their primary donors) get their way. They don’t want any shared services because they think that every penny that comes across their desk should be spent on themselves because they earned it. They do not appreciate the infrastructure and knowledge that we all inherited, nor do they see lower-class people as equal to themselves. When they make us all pay individually for our healthcare, come hell or high water, they will next come for any other protective services. Forget welfare and social security, we’ll need to get fire truck insurance and ambulance insurance and police insurance. Has the insurance system been working well for you? Would you rather save half of your taxes (other half is for military, whose waste I guess we ignore?) but be forced to pool in with your neighbors to build your own roads? And then the corporations who “own” and provide raw materials can charge and change prices for anyone, for whatever reason they want, jacking them up for rural people or forcing areas to buy other shit from their companies first. Does that sound efficient? Does that sound like it will work in your favor? Or does that sound like it’s adding more needless corporate leeching into the mix?

Do you know why we have such an advanced society? Because we share. Because instead of each of us learning how to be doctors and lawyers and construction workers and architects and chefs and teachers and farmers etc, we specialize in one job so we each can become expert. This requires that we lean on our community for everything else. No one on this Earth knows how to make a pencil by themselves. No one knows how to mine the graphite, and chop and shuck the wood, and process the rubber, etc. Not one person can do it all. Make a pencil. Remember that when you think about people’s claim that they are “self made” or earning billions of dollars. No fucking way. We all work together. We can only survive together. We, as a species, can only be this efficient and this advanced if we work together. If you have the kind of money in which paying taxes feels like a lot — you are a lucky one. Pay it back. Because social capital is still the most important thing. The social capital we’ve achieved as a society is your biggest protection. Otherwise the biggest thug with the most guns takes it all. So pay your taxes!!

Follow the Moral Heathen on Twitter: @moral_heathen or send mail to moralheathensays@gmail.com