From one of my favorite bloggers comes this video. It is a long one, but, as Pithless Thoughts puts it, this is one of the best critiques of positive thinking that I have seen and heard. It is purely secular and it is 10 minutes long. But, take the time to watch. It will be worth it.
The blog of a Cuban who became an Eastern Orthodox priest.
As someone who’s had a progressive and incurable disease for 16 years? Yes!
It has that worst feature of the caste systems – it allows those who have wealth/health/whatever to enjoy them in the firm belief that those who don’t brought it on themselves.
Yes, how often do we hear that assumption that those who are “supposedly poor” are really lazy, or drug users, or welfare queens, etc.? These are all the result of the assumption that anyone who wants to can bootstrap themselves out of their condition. Moreover, the few who do are cited as examples that the majority could if they would only try.
This allows many to simply bypass the idea of helping the destitute, unless it is something like a hurricane, tornado, or flood. After all, it is really their fault.
Of course, this does not negate the fact that there ARE lazy people and people who are willing to blame everything but their laziness for their lack. I cite the kid that my daughter had to deal with in high school who blamed his bad grades on–the teacher doesn’t like black kids. My daughter who is of African ancestry was making an A in the class. She also knew that the kid who was blaming the teacher had not handed in any of his homework which was something like 40% of the grade. She quickly reminded him that she was black and making an A and that it might have something to do with studying–as in she did and he didn’t.
I do agree with you. On the post for tomorrow I point out that there really are lazy people. This is only part 1.
I just want to note the progression in the comments of what is an underlying unspoken feature of the discussion of “the poor” in America. To describe the poor as “lazy” really is coded language to discuss African Americans and/or Mexican Americans for decades. Although it began much earlier, the stereotypes and archetypes featured prominently in political speeches from the 1970’s onward (“lazy,” or “drug users,” or “welfare queens”) are coded language chiefly employed in discussing African Americans. Ronald Reagan made a speech in which he derided young bucks and women in Cadillacs who bought steak while on welfare, and he was applauded for it.
In fact, historically in America, despite the fact that African Americans were major producers of capital and wealth for the United States, chiefly as uncompensated labor working from sunup to sundown on plantations in the antebellum period, as sharecroppers from Reconstruction through the present (yes there are still sharecroppers), and as working men excluded from trades, guilds, unions, and lucrative who nevertheless labored as janitors, field hands, ditchdiggers, etc. African Americans have been still been described as “lazy” and “shiftless.”
I point this out because the next comment went directly to providing an example featuring an African American who is “lazy” to supposedly refute the point made in the video.
I would like to point out that 3 billion people in the world live on less than $2 dollar a day. These people are poor by anyone’s definition, and yet many work 18 hour days in appalling circumstances. Men, women and children labor in garbage dumps, factories, manually hauling, digging, and performing truly backbreaking labor.
When the bible discusses the poor, the majority of times it is linked to oppression. Scripture does link poverty to laziness in the book of Proverbs, however the number of instances is overwhelmed by the Bible’s presentation of poverty as a consequence of oppression. However in America, the verses in Proverbs are the ones which Christians cling to and cite in discussions of poverty. The duality that hard work is rewarded with success is indeed in Scripture, but any true discussion of poverty in the United States is extremely difficult to have due to complexity of race and class as a continuing factor in the operation of the American economic context.
I rather resent your using me as an example when you know nothing about me or the reasons behind my comment. I have lived for many years in the Black Community, and was deeply involved in the Black church when I was married to my daughter’s father who was African American. He and his family were anything but lazy and neither are my daughter and my step son.
That being said, we had the experience of both my step son and my daughter being “called out of their names” because they excelled at school, did not regularly use “ghetto” English or write school essays in it, worked hard at after school jobs and were determined to go to college. Both of them did and have done very well. My daughter is starting on her Master’s this year.
Just because something is a stereotype does not mean that NO ONE in that culture IS that stereotype. The Irish are touted as drunks, but most of my Irish friends are not. I do know one or two who ARE drunks, however. Jews are stereotyped as stingy and Polish as stupid and Swedes as blockheads. Most aren’t, but a very few are.
As a military brat, I had the benefit of living in more than one country and in more than one state. The kids I grew up with were every culture and hyphen American you could think of. Few of those kids were lazy, shiftless, etc etc–name the stereotype. I did not grow up denegrating people because of their ethnicy, the amount of melenan in their skin,or the culture or country that they, their parents or grandparents or great grand parents came to the USA from.
My parents were people who believed in being a part of the community not just a part of the military and so I have had “civilian” friends in every locality I have lived in here in the US or abroad. I am well aware of the poverty that some people live in. We were on Okinawa 10 years after WWII. I knew people who happily rummaged through the Americans garbage to eat. I have been poor enough myself to rummage in a dumpster at one point in my life.
Perhaps you have had those experiences as well. I do not know. I just have to say that your statements smack to me of over generalization. I could talk about my family’s personal history and how it was be overcome. I can speak about a dear friend ( in current age speak–a woman of color) who was orphaned young, raised by illiterate sharecropper grandparents, who now holds a Doctorate in Nursing and a very high position in the hospital system she works in. Another friend (ditto-woman of color) whose mother was a maid and father was a GS 4 mail room clerk rose to a high position in her company and was the first Black woman to head a department–had a top security clearance, etc. etc. I could go on and on. Are these exceptional people? They didn’t seem to me to be anything but regular folks but the difference was they refused to allow obstacles to stand in their way and they persevered.
I am starting to ramble, so I will stop–but just because you start out poor–my father was orphaned as an infant and went to work at 14 to help put food on the table for his brothers and sister–you can–with a lot of hard work and a bit of good fortune for lack of a better term end the cycle of poverty.