This is a rant, so get ready. It's also political, and just so you know, if you argue against me, which is totally okay, you still will not convince me to shrug off my belief in helping my fellow man, hang the expense. You have been duly warned.
Do you ever just read something and get so ticked that you just have to tell someone else about it before you start ranting at the first random stranger who crosses your path?
Here's a little something from Yahoo News today regarding the comments of one Andre Bauer, who is one of those Republicans that make us flamin' liberals wonder if the other side has lost complete touch with reality. I know that isn't true, but this man has certainly lost contact with the world at large; he clearly only sees money:
At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: "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."
I cannot begin to explain how wrong he is, and I don't want to start going off about how evil this is.
Do you guys know Jonathan Swift? Dead guy, 1667-1745, wrote Gulliver's Travels? Well, take a peek.
Are you done? Did you check out that portrait? Hilarious, right? That hair? I'm betting fake, but still!
Okay, so satirist, right? Wrote a lot about stupid arguments that other people have, so he could laugh at them, which is the most fun kind of political writing ever. Or the most depressing. Either way, he wrote a little essay called A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick which pretty much stated that the Irish, being as a number of them were in pretty bad shape financially and in want of food, should just roast up their kids and eat them, since they had so many.
Needless to say, not serious.
Except he really did need to say that, because the number of people who took him seriously and were completely appalled was staggering.
He was making fun of all the people who railed against helping the poor. While advising on how to prepare children before eating them, and recommending eating them early while they were still plenty tender.
Go read it, really. Project Gutenberg, right here.
Amazing example of sustained irony in writing. Really, this guy was good. His idea? Evil. But he knew it. That's why we can still read this essay and get a laugh out of it. Because he's totally joking about the whole thing.
Unfortunately, the Idiot--sorry the Lt. Governor of South Carolina is not joking. He's being plenty serious.
That's tragic.
It shocks me that anyone can be left in the world and be clueless about poverty. You might not be poor, you might not know anyone who is or has been poor, but with television and the internet, I would think you'd have to figure it all out eventually.
Being poor is not something people do for fun, nor by choice.
Now, you're going to argue with me about drug use and alcohol, but that's not what I'm talking about. Plenty of rich people live dependant on drugs and alcohol and don't lose their lives of luxury. Supermodels, for example. Nothing keeps you skinny like coke... But even if I were talking drug abuse, the people who struggle with addiction have children too, and those kids are left with nothing.
In today's economic climate, that's not always the case. People are being fired left and right. Families with nice cars and fantastic houses end up with nothing but debt, and it would be immoral to expect them to magically conjure up an equal income to the one they had before. When I was in school, they told us that accountants were guaranteed work, no matter what--that if you got an accounting degree you could get a job instantly and anywhere with a salary as high as you could hope for in your first year of employment. But now accountants are being shown the door--not to mention all the teachers, factory workers, and lately even Walmart associates that are out of work.
We cannot blame the poor for the mistakes of the upper 1%, the hundred-odd people whose money determines policy for investment and the actions of corporations they lead and the political figures their donations support.
If you're reading this and getting angry at Laura the Stupid Clueless Liberal, good for you! You must have come from a family with some money, enough that you were comfortable and don't remember weeks with pancakes every night because that was so much cheaper than buying meat.
You don't remember your parents being happy that your family had even that, or the times you walked through the grocery store while your mother used a calculator to figure out what she could afford that week. Or the Christmases when your parents would take you aside and tell you this year wouldn't be as nice as other years, but that they loved you and that was what was important.
I wouldn't wish that on people, though I can see how understanding what it's like to struggle to make ends meet can make you a better human being.
So if you never went through that, I'm glad. I only ask that you consider that not everyone is that lucky. Which Lt. Governor Bauer certainly doesn't understand.
Is it wrong of me to want people who serve the public to understand the public? I don't think so. Somebody in South Carolina ought to boo that guy off the stage, because really! That is the kind of messed up idea that leads to only badness. The next thing he's going to say is that Haiti deserved their troubles because of devil worship or something. Keith Olbermann has something to say about that. Maybe he should get one of these. I know I want one...
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