Random Thoughts on Obscenity

This is the part where I start ranting and you guys realize I couldn't blog my way out of a paper bag and quietly unbookmark me. I'm cool with that.

All of this bullshit about "obscenity" has me thinking, though. Despite the entire concept of "PC", it's long been obvious to me that it's not the left that has issues with form. Over on the other side of the cultural chasm dwell people who feel that ideas are not obscene, only words. It's not all of them by any means, a good many on the right think it's immoral to not support Bush but perfectly okay to use words like "raghead" in casual conversation.

But for the most part, it's wrong to suggest people have died needlessly in a war, but okay to keep sending people to do it. It's wrong to joke about Cheney's close call with a suicide bomber, but perfectly fine to make "Rachel Corrie pancake" jokes, or to joke about poisoning a Supreme Court Justice. Also it's wrong to call Dick Cheney's daughter a lesbian, but okay for Alan Keyes to throw his daughter out for being a lesbian.


And apparently, it's perfectly okay to arrange things, through negligence and malice at the ballot box, so that children die without adequate health care, but it's wrong to use the word "motherfuckers" when referring to insurance company execs who spend millions annually to preserve our tangled and inadequate health care system, or the legislators who connive with them at it, or the racist bastards in this country who are so lacking in any sort of humanity that they cannot begin to imagine what being poor, really poor, is like.

It's that last one that gets me. Maybe it shouldn't be, maybe everything needs to take a backseat to the war in Iraq, and the brand new expansion set they're marketing for Iran. But the money that we're spending to kill people in Iraq who matter so little we can't even be bothered to count them, is money that can't be used here for LIHEAP and for Medicaid and for schools, and for all our other priorities we're ignoring.

I know, of course, that without the war in Iraq, none of that money would be spent that way anyway, mostly because it simply doesn't exist. It's debt spending, and if we weren't shovelling it into a hole in the sand, it wouldn't be in our budget anyway. But I also know that, even assuming it's possible, paying off those debts will keep us from doing anything about our own problems when the war has ended, assuming it ever does. And I know that this is, as the kids say, a feature not a bug. Grover Norquist has a lot to answer for.

I find that all obscene, which is probably what I was getting at. That we'd rather kill an Iraqi kid than save the kid down the block. That we'd rather give a tax break on investment income than on money earned by families working their asses off every day. That we'd rather pretend we're painting schools in a war zone than actually fix some here. That the nation is full of people who have always been so favored that they simply cannot conceive that it would be possible to have literally no legal way of getting your hands on fifty dollars, or that it would be possible to have no way of getting your sick kid across town without spending all day at it and losing your job.

The nation is full of people who've always been comfortable, who've never had to stitch two or three jobs together to make a living, who've been driving since they were teenagers and begrudge tax money spent on mass transit because, after all, they don't use it. (Which is not the same as saying they don't benefit from it. Their gas prices are lower because of less demand, their commute is shorter because they are not stuck behind extra cars, and they don't even have to deal with the inconvenience personally. Moral free riders who don't even have the grace to realize they're the lifestyle beneficiaries, not the tax victims, of public transportation.)

I digress, of course. I do a lot. If you're still reading, you're probably used to it.

But even more than the practical issues, these are people who simply don't know the most important thing, to my mind, about poverty: it is exhausting. Between the impossible decisions, and the long hours at jobs that are generally hard labor and at the very least mean you don't sit down, ever, and the sheer time it takes to get any random errand done, and the health issues that result from having no insurance and working jobs that can be dangerous and are certainly physically demanding, it will grind you down. Add in the well-founded fear that tomorrow's bills can't be met, tonight the family doesn't have much more than Top Ramen for dinner (just like last night), the kid telling you her classmates make fun of her clothes and your having no way to protect her from that, the pain in your wrist that makes you worry if you can hold onto your cashier job much longer, and the smug assholes who apparently lead us telling you that the economy is going great, and what the hell is wrong with you that you're still struggling? At about this point, a bill collector will call and try to convince you you own something you can sell so you can pay them. Now find someone you can ask for help, and know that you're going to have to endure a lecture on self-reliance. And then try to actually sleep with all of this going on in your head, because you have to be up again early to make two bus connections to get to your first job. Even the exhaustion is exhausting.

An extreme case? Not really. It can get worse. Your neighborhood is more likely to have more crime and pollution, your local grocery store is more likely to have higher prices since it's the only one people in your neighborhood can get to, you may be living in a "residential" hotel because you could never scrape together the money for a deposit on an apartment so now you're paying an absurd amount for rent and you don't even have a refrigerator or stove so what you eat is what you can buy pre-made and you're paying "tourist taxes" on top of it, you could easily have a teenage son who's planning to join the army because some recruiter lied to him about a desk job and how else is he ever going to get an education, you may have a serious medical problem that's going to kill you or disable you but not before it racks up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills you can't pay, and your parents are just as likely to be suffering from the general gamut of supervision-requiring infirmities a suburban household's aging parents are but without the wherewithal to do anything about it.

And the most useful thing our government has to say to you is, "Well, go back to school so you can get a better job."

That's obscene. That and pretending it doesn't happen because you can't imagine it happening to you.

I don't wish these people poverty, though it looks more and more like the Bush administration kinda does (via Slacktivist), I wish them empathy. I wish them a glimpse at the realities they're lucky not to have to deal with. I wish them an understanding that it very much can be a matter of luck. Because while certainly having some asshole suggest that if you had cancelled your cable you wouldn't now have a dead child on your hands is not the worst thing that has happened to you, it makes things worse. Maybe only a tiny bit. But that should still be too much, and it is still more than anyone should have to bear in a country that thinks of itself as civilized.


(edited for that stupid font thing again.)