Quote:
Originally Posted by Jdawgboy
You sound like a typical Conservative that basically thinks everyone is on their own, no social programs of any kind. Theres several flaws with that sort of thinking but since I only want to discuss one, I won't bother to get into the others.
You're right, the world is a harsh place, but you're assuming that everyone is on the same level when they begin their lives. Not everyone is born into a decent life with decent financial situations. Many people go to work (as you put it) sometimes two jobs and they still can't afford to live in an apartment or home. Some people have medical issues which could keep them from working. There's other reasons as well but to make this as short as possible, I'll only site those two. As far as at what point is the demarcation between low-income to lower middle/middle, well personally, I feel that should depend on individual situation as opposed to an across the board hard number, but I know that won't happen anytime soon if ever. I do think there are problems with how the system works but at the same time, I'm glad there is at least some effort to create affordable housing.
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An anecdote in support of the notion that conservatives cannot empathize with the outcomes of the real world, which are oftentimes outside of our control.
I was born with almost every advantage in life that I could possibly have. Yes, I might be gay, but my family accepted and embraced me from a young age, I benefit from the color of my skin (I'm white), I come from a very wealthy and well connected family, I never had to want for food, clothing, shelter, I got a great education that was paid for. My family is no longer the bastion of stability it once was, and many of them have turned in to drug addicts or worse. My support system has for the most part vanished because of choices others in my life made for themselves.
I earned an undergraduate and a masters and then went to go get my Ph.D., but during that time I was targeted by a man in South Carolina who was deliberately infecting people with HIV. I got other chronic medical conditions from the same gentleman, as well. Yes, it was my choice to sleep with him, but I could not see him for what he really was. He was so smoothly playing me because he was so angry at the world for his own infection that he made it his mission to infect every gay man who expressed romantic interest in him. And the saddest part is that I had feelings for him, the first person who had ever seemingly shown me reciprocated romantic interest. Yet... it was all a lie.
I stepped into new a world that, for the first time, for me had no support system and I no longer knew how to support myself so that I could emerge from my chronic depression. I had to drop out, despite being the department's top graduate student in my year with multiple competitive grants and fellowships with straight As, the depression was too much for me to handle in the isolating environment of a Ph.D. program. I would have never recovered and would have committed suicide eventually had I stayed. And you know what? I'm glad I left, knowing that the semester after I left two other graduate students at USC, one of whom was someone that I had taught, committed suicide.
I was, and still am, on daily doses of a number of medications with side effects that seem to affect me more than they do others. One of the multiple HIV medications I've been on is now the target of a class action lawsuit because the manufacturer, Gilead, held off on bringing a replacement drug to the market despite knowing that Stribild had debilitating irreversible side effects on bone density and liver function which they had chosen not to disclose that the replacement (Genvoya) did not have just so that they could prolong their profits on the back of a captive market largely without political or economic power. (HIV affects a mostly minority LGBT population and the women who sleep with gay men on the "down low" in the United States).
Because of my decreased bone density, I suffer daily which makes it difficult to find and keep the only work I can find - serving and bartending - where physical tasks are routine. Because of my decreased bone density, my teeth are decaying in front of my eyes, which requires routine dental work. Unfortunately, the old adage about Ph.D. student drop-outs being baristas, servers, and bartenders is true, but why? Because we spend our entire lives networking and training for one purpose and once that purpose is unattainable to us, our skillsets are very difficult to leverage into a well paying job in the private market.
And we don't have the ability to just go off and teach public school, because of state requirements on teachers that are not present on college educators that we never fulfilled. I'd have to go back to school just to get those requirements and certifications, but exactly when am I going to find the time to do that while I'm juggling multiple jobs, getting constant dental work, having government mandated managed healthcare taking up multiple doctors visits a month, case management visits that take up way too much time just to re-certify for a government (mis)managed program to provide me HIV medication because I currently can't afford it on my own (but can't find a way to get into a job that will work with my time constraints that pays me enough for me to even be able to get off the government's tit), mental health care visits once or twice weekly, the extra sleep I need because of all the medications I'm on, and always wondering if I'm gonna get the time off to do all these things so that I can stay on my meds and when I don't maybe I'll get fired but can't actually do anything about it because the government doesn't actually take seriously EEOC, workplace discrimination, or otherwise enforce any kind of fairness in the workplace, not to mention the constant depression and anxiety feeling like I have zero friends anymore, no family that is healthy to be around, and like I'm going to die alone because I'm unattractive and undesirable because of my health?
All because some guy I liked was playing me, deliberately trying to infect me with HIV, and succeeded at it.
And then I finally find somebody else who accepts me for who I am. Except he ended up being abusive and putting me in the hospital for three weeks after kicking me in the stomach and giving me a hiatal hernia. I tried to leave, I tried to kick him out, I tried to change him and to change myself to make him less irrationally angry at me. In the end, he cost me my job because of lost time and him coming around to the restaurant, he cost me my lease because the neighbors made noise complaints every time I couldn't get him to calm down in his fits of rage, and after I got out of the hospital I ended up homeless bouncing around on couches and sleeping in my car. What exactly was I supposed to do differently? I tried lifting myself up by my bootstraps, but I failed.
Conservatives like to say that they alone know how the world works and that its tough out here for a pimp, and we liberals should all just man up and get used to it. But that isn't actually true. The difference between liberals and conservatives is not who knows that the world is tough. The difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives think the world is tough and it should be up to each person to lift themselves up regardless of their background and current circumstances, to damned if they actually have the tools necessary to do that heavy lifting, while liberals understand that it takes a village to collectively lift all of us up together without leaving anyone behind. It isn't about one group knowing more about the world than the other, but about one group having a fundamentally different strategy about how to face that world.
Yes, personal responsibility should matter, but I have done my best to be responsible. I made every decision in the moment the best I knew how, and the outcomes still weren't ideal, because often the options I had presented to me were all bad options. Many, many people are facing even worse than what I had, and are we just supposed to expect them to rise up on their own?
So,
zrx299, exactly what am I supposed to do? Should I just go magically find a job that pays me more so that I can afford to live and will be willing to work with the fact that I can, at most, work 30 hours a week?
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) posts on SSP on a variety of topics. You have been a long time and valuable contributor on SSP, and I sincerely hope the very best for you.
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