I wanted to share with this listserv a question that’s running around on Facebook and my responses to it to see what progressive folks on this blog think about it.
The statement is: homeless servicemen should come before any refugee. Yes or no?
My first response was angry and I decided not to post it because I thought it would be counterproductive. But I’ll post it here. My second response I went ahead and posted, although I’m not interested in arguing with those people.
My first response was:
“Of course. Said this liberal. (But what the hell do you mean by “comes before”?). Strikes me as an inherently evil-intended question. Why is it that it is so important that you know your pecking order for who gets thrown out in the cold first? The need to satisfy your tribal need to feel secure and part of an exclusive group? Amazing.”
The response I posted was:
“Sorry to say this, but it’s sad that you have the need to conduct this exercise in scarcity and fear. There is no answer to this vague and ill-defined question.
Of course we take care of the homeless service member first. But where do you draw the line?
If the refugee is drowning in front of you, do you stop to provide the service member with some luxury, even if it causes the refugee to drown right in front of you? This example shows what a ridiculous question it really is once you think about it.
You help both of them. If you are a civilized human being you know that your response should depend on what the needs are.
Or is this question meant just to relieve your guilt about not helping the refugees?”
Do you Blue Mass people agree with me that this question being posted all over Facebook by conservatives is a revealing glimpse into the soul of the Right?
…which “informed” the complaints by those objecting to fast food workers asking for $15/hr to the effect that EMTs weren’t making that much and they do more important/more highly skilled work. Maybe the latter should make more than the former, but the point is that EVERYBODY should get at least $15 and the minimum wage law would cover all occupations. Likewise help both and anyone who complains about veterans not being helped should have the question thrown right back at them in the form of what do you propose to make “homeless veteran” an oxymoron?
The premise assumes that the Right has a quantifiable soul. I do not accept this as demonstrate-able.
as our heroic mentor,Ted Kennedy,taught us many years ago.
(NOTE : Terry McGinty was a Legal Fellow to the late Senator Ted Kennedy and I recently served as a volunteer docent at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the US Senate).
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Of course its a simple question used to arouse resentment against immigration, but the answer that you help both of them is just as simplistic.
There are limited resources. If people need help there has to be accountability and the need for help must be real.
Vida Causey in Worcester was just convicted for food stamp fraud in Sept.
to the tune of 3.6 MILLION. That is not an anecdotal drop in the bucket.
Your comment jumps from talking point to talking point without pausing to ask directions from one to the next.
Yes, resources are limited. They are more limited today for the 99% than they were ten years ago, and more limited then than they were twenty years ago. Resources are increasingly limited for the 99% because the top one percent TAKE SO MUCH MORE TODAY than they have in the past.
If your child is drowning, do you expect the lifeguard to insist on “accountability”? You would have the lifeguard waggle a finger at her and say “I saw you horsing around out there” as she goes under for the last time.
I’ll tell you where we need “accountability” — our wealthiest one percent need to tell the rest of us a LOT more about what portion of their ACTUAL wealth they pay in state and federal taxes, where that wealth comes from, and where they keep it.
You express concern about food stamp fraud of $3.6 MILLION, and exclaim that “that is not an anecdotal drop in the bucket”. In comparison to the fortunes of our wealthiest that go unmentioned, undisclosed (at least for tax purposes), and untaxed, that $3.6M most certainly IS an anecdotal drop in the bucket.
Let me offer a specific example. Abigail Johnson, President and CEO of Fidelity Investments, has a current net worth of $12.5 BILLION dollars. That’s a twelve, a comma, a five, and EIGHT ZEROS. Just the round off to the nearest billion is a fortune to pretty much anybody here.
The Dow Jones average was up 0.6% yesterday. Let’s use that as a proxy for a typical day for the portfolio of Ms. Johnson. Abigail Johnson — ONE PERSON — gained SEVENTY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS from that change. The same average is down 2.55% this year — that’s a loss of $318 M for the year.
I submit that your $3.6 M is, at best, an anecdotal drop in the bucket. I submit that ANY decent accountant could find a discrepancy of 0.1% in Ms. Johnson’s balance sheet. I submit that neither Ms. Johnson nor her accountants would so much as bat an eye at signing off on a correction. That correction (about $12.5M) was paid off by about an hour of yesterday’s trading. Ms. Johnson gains or loses the amount of the fraud you mention during her morning coffee.
I don’t know whether all this is simple or not. What I DO know is that our wealthiest are enjoying a full and complete recovery from the Great Recession, while the rest of us are arguing about the crumbs under their table.
To go back to the lifeguard example, they are telling you to choose which of your children you want the single on-duty lifeguard to rescue while they entertain the entire swim team at their private party on the beach.
They force you and me to make agonizing life or death choices while they consume the resources needed to avoid the issue entirely.
They are playing us for suckers. The question is why we allow the game to continue.
… I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Vida Causey owned a convenience store and defrauded rightful recipients of food stamps by purchasing their coupons for 50 cents on the dollar, pocketing the remaining 50 cents, in various shell accounts, as profit. It had nothing to do with food stamps, being ordinary, every day, run-of-the-mill, profiteering that has foods stamps as a commodity only and represents simple further exploitation of the poor and working poor by the rentier classes…
Vida Causey is no different than a circa 2007 mortgage broker who sold a billion dollars worth of liars loans and sold them to somebody else. Mortgages or food stamps, the scam was the same…
So people who need food (supposedly) could go and get a dollars worth of beans, rice, kale and other nutrients for their family. Or they could sell the coupons for 50 cents on the dollar and go get 50 cents worth of Pabst Blue Ribbon , to the tune of 3.6 MILLION, that was the bargain that was made?
Is that it in a nutshell?
They probably just go next door to Club Keiko and get a beer. (I know the
neighborhood)
they might need soap, toothpaste, laundry detergent or a host of other things that you can’t buy with food stamps.
While you’re fixated on the guy with the beer or the single mom buying a Snickers bar with with her WIC, you’re attention is diverted (by design) from the billions being taken by fraudulent practices on Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, and the rest.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer feller as they say
… invites exactly these kinds of transactions. Why would you think they don’t?
Leaving aside the bumbling feint you’ve just attempted, wherein blame is shifted from your initial intimations of welfare abuse on the part of Vida Causey towards the poor she bilked… Scolding the poor for their poverty is exactly the rationale Vida Causey used to bilk them and the government that is trying to help them. Or, put another way, Vida Causey’s exploitation is not possible without your condemnation
Have you no decency, sir?
Would that America of today have the same sense decency that the gallery displayed in 1954, more than fifty years ago.
They always set up false choices like that. Help “deserving” veterans or
“undeserving” refugees. Help “undeserving blacks/gays/Hispanics” or “deserving whites/English speakers/straights”. Help “deserving” Christians instead of “undeserving” Muslims.
It’s the same old backlash playbook, and part of the reason we have scarce resources to provide help for everyone is because of the massive amount of money we waste subsidizing the high profits of corporations and paying for welfare states on army bases and in occupied countries overseas while killing the safety net with a thousand cuts at home. The conventional argument is that they are racist for making these trade offs-but my argument is that we shouldn’t have to be making them in the first place.
… to which the only sane reply is “So, how many servicemen are you hosting in your spare bedroom? Your vacation home? … Or even just your couch?”
To the extent that the service has nothing to do with homelessness there’s no difference between an given homeless person (serviceman or otherwise) and any give refugee. The needs are the same
To the extent that their homelessness is derived from service it’s often because of wounds, visible and hidden, which have overwhelmed the servicemans ability to cope with daily life and thus problem is much much more complex.
If you start with the premise that neither the homeless nor the refugee chose their position, the ability to judge fairly ebbs away and, one hopes, compassion for suffering comes to the fore.
n/t
The same “veteran vs. immigrant” meme made the rounds here last election cycle. In an attempt to unseat a number of Democratic House members, Mass. Fiscal Alliance concocted a story that the House Democrats had voted unanimously to take “the side of illegal immigrants over military veterans.” Mass. Fiscal’s effort had limited electoral success, but apparently the meme hasn’t lost its power to intoxicate.
I just wouldn’t take the bait and refuse to make it an “either/or.”
I’d simply respond “What have you done to help a homeless vet today?”
The correct answer, the only answer, is, of course: Ronald Reagan
Not so much divide and conquer, but divide and decide who to put on the bottom. Then ignore or blame them all.
Basically, the black guy did it
Do we help the poor refugee or the service veteran? Do we embrace free market capitalism or totalitarian communism? Do we turn the Middle East into a glowing sea of glass or do we watch as all our cities burn? Do we support the death penalty or do we offer rehabilitation and reward to the person who tortured and murdered our loved one? And on and on.
I ask these people, “Can’t we do both?” or “Do we have to do either. Is there no other option?” In their mind, there can only be one or the other. In their mind, there is no other option. This is all because they are confined by their ideology.
As President Clinton said, “The problem with ideology is, if you’ve got an ideology, you’ve already got your mind made up. You know all the answers and that makes evidence irrelevant and arguments a waste of time. You tend to govern by assertion and attacks.”
The holiday season is upon us and no doubt we will all be confronted by someone who is this person. It might be Uncle Bill at Christmas dinner or maybe a co-worker at the office party.
The key to this is simple at first and then the work begins. You have to get them off their ideology. It’s not as hard as it sounds. (and you have to be careful not to fall into an ideology of your own). You start by agreeing with them. That’s right, agree. Once you agree, they will stop arguing with you and start listening. That’s the easy part. Now comes the hard part. Once you agree, you have to follow with “but” or “however” or “have you considered” or “wouldn’t it be an option to….” and that is your opening to a world outside this person’s ideology.
For example, “I agree, our duty is to our brave men and women who fought for our country and it’s a shame that so many are in need”, followed by, “However, it’s hard to believe that a nation as great and powerful as the USA can’t do both, as we acknowledge that was built by immigrants like my grandparents and yours, seeking freedom and a better life.”
It takes practice and a few prepared scripts (I have several for all the typical topics). If anyone needs a few pointers, just reach out to me and I’m happy to help.