Reply to Stop calling yourself blessed when what you are is privileged

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Stop calling yourself blessed when what you are is privileged "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Redlining. Food deserts. Segregation.

Educate yourself. [/quote]

Haven’t existed in most of our life times; WIC, SNAP, school lunches, food pantries; people choosing to live in affordable housing in an expensive area or as part of an immigrant community with shared language or with long-standing community (see gentrification arguments).

None of these things are determinative of your life.  Ask the millions of people now living who have moved up the SES ladder.   If you want to improve social mobility, vote for and insist on functional government that provides law and order and schools with real expectations and discipline.  Include vocational education.  Eliminating objective measures of educational achievement and lowering overall behavioral expectations for kids, while also eliminating the negatives of poverty will leave the people you say you care about in a terrible way that has nothing to do with racism.

[b]Even the poorest US citizens are “blessed.[/b]”[/quote]

Can you explain why?  I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but the nationalism in your response is intriguing.  You seem to identify a number of things people should be advocating for HERE, so they don't exist uniformly?  And what does this country have that is unique to us?  [/quote]

Yes, I can explain why.  Even the poorest here are wealthy in comparison to many places around the world.  They enjoy larger homes, appliances, cell phones, more than adequate calories, free public education, world class medical care paid for by the government.  Now, are there a few individuals who do NOT receive these things?  Yes, there are poor people who do not seek out the free prenatal care, or who use the ER for sporadic and uncoordinated care.  There are mentally ill people who live on the streets despite the existence of shelters, SSI checks and mental health programs created for vets and the homeless.  There are illegal immigrants who do not qualify for some of the programs (but whose children still receive three free meals a day from the schools).  And there are kids for whom the schools fail to provide them with an excellent education (which is why I made that a major discussion point above.). There are people who live in violence plagued cities and impoverished coal country.  These are dysfunctional places, but even those people have the freedom to move somewhere else.  And yes, it takes some money to move, but not much.

U.S. citizens mostly still have free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to seek redress against the government, property rights, a right to due process and a mostly fair legal system.  These things are extremely valuable and not available to billions of people in the world.

I did not mention anything about other countries.  Are some people blessed to be born in Sweden or Germany?  Yes.  There was nothing "nationalistic" about my response.  It is factual.[/quote]

Fascinating.  I think it is your framing that I find odd.  It is true that people that have access to the things you describe are better off than those that do not.  But access to those things is so wide and varied even on a localized level. The social welfare programs you identify are not equally accessible even within this country.  And many of the things you describe are more accessible in many many other countries.  So I find it odd to frame it as being blessed to be in the U.S., as opposed to having access to those things you describe.

I would also quibble with a lot of what you said regarding a "mostly fair legal system" and free "world class healthcare", but that might take us too far off topic...[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics