Just Go Away, Already!

So this Media Matters piece about the ACORN video hoax has conservative turd-stirrer Andrew Breitbart describing ACORN rally attendees as "common street thugs, the dregs of society." After writing yesterday about the screw the peasants mentality that governs this country, a featured quote from Digby about the hoax jumped out especially sharply:

... But the less than obvious reason this is a big deal is that the pimp and ho costumes were a send-up of over-the-top racial stereotypes that both reinforced some very ugly notions about the African American community, but more importantly, made these ACORN workers look as though they were so dumb they shouldn't be allowed to cross the street, much less handle tax dollars. And this was done for a reason. ...

Many have reported that even before James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles lied their way into the nation's news studios, conservatives loathed ACORN for, it seemed, the grievous sin of registering voters in poor and minority communities. You can't let the dregs of society vote, I guess. The ongoing hatefest was so over the top that when hired canvassers turned in fake voter registrations in order to get paid for not working, basically defrauding ACORN, and ACORN flagged those forms themselves before turning them in as required by law, ACORN would get accused of vote fraud.

Conservative accusation of vote fraud have in fact routinely been cover for vote suppression and illegal campaigns of misinformation and intimidation that began shortly after the Civil Rights era in order to reduce poor and minority turnout at the polls. That is, the conservatives accuse the poor and brown of fraud while they're actually disenfranchising them.

The worry seems to be that they'll vote for a more just, equitable society where the rules aren't all rigged in favor of a wealthy elite. Which reminds me, and I promise that this is on point, of what Sara Robinson wrote yesterday about what the lack of universal health care means to ordinary Americans:

... [T]here's plenty of evidence that America's inhumane method of health care rationing has already made us less competitive on scores of other fronts. It's crippled our ability to compete as workers in a global labor market. It's eroded the competitiveness of American businesses. It's gradually stealing away our life expectancy, and creating infant mortality rates that put us dead last in the developed world. In an era of superbugs and global epidemics, it has become a serious security issue that has left us vulnerable to attack.

Over the years, it's kept millions of us chained to crappy jobs with marginal insurance when we should have been out there starting our own businesses, going back to school to upgrade our skills, spending time traveling or raising our families, and doing a thousand other things that would have made America smarter, stronger, and more competitive in the long run. It's caused us to put off seeing doctors for years on end, resulting in entire generations whose health has been sapped by decades of deferred maintenance -- and who are yet still forced to compete with robustly healthy workers around the world who've always gotten whatever care they needed. ...

It's obvious from the way conservative politicians react towards funding even the limited health care available for seniors and the impoverished that they'd rather not be forced to do it at all. They don't care. And the uninsured? They don't care. The jobless? We all watched the news yesterday: they really, really don't care.

But the thing is, all these people these corporatist politicians say we're not supposed to care about, what's supposed to happen to them? Oh, well, they're supposed to learn about good morals and personal responsibility and hard work and to try harder next time. Next time? Like in a video game? Hello, dumb@sses, people only get one go-through at life that we know of, so unless the federal government is supposed to use the same policy determination rubric as the Spanish Inquisition (better afterliving through brutality,) we have to stay focused on this one.

And seriously, has starving to death on a sidewalk in front of an office tower ever taught anyone a redeeming moral lesson? Are we to understand that there's a good parable about responsibility in a longtime factory worker losing their job close to retirement age, when their spouse is too sick to work, and losing their home to have to move in with their not-very-well-off kids? Is anyone made a better human being when a debt-riddled asthmatic waits a few minutes too long to call an ambulance because she's flat broke, then dies before anyone can get to her, orphaning two young children?

I think not. The only lesson from those things is that, as it would usually be phrased, 'life' is cruel. Yet life, an impersonal noun denoting the condition of being animate and self-organizing, isn't responsible for all of this seemingly meaningless suffering. Everyone knows that bad fortune often comes without regard to how good or nice or responsible a person was. So people stumble, sure. Where was the person who was supposed to pick them up because, dammit, they were part of our group and they have nowhere else to turn?

When we fail each other, we fail.

You don't have to read the Cain and Abel story in Genesis for that lesson, either. Though you could. Indeed, recent empirical evidence shows that inequality is bad for everyone in a society and that more equal societies are healthier, happier societies. Humans literally make ourselves sick and unhappy when we treat each other badly, when we neglect and do badly by each other.

Human societies are better when instead of pushing away the "dregs," they stop structuring their economies to create more poverty, as ours does.

Those who are offended by organizations that help the poor, who are offended by the idea that everyone should get health care because it means slightly fewer billionaires will be made, they seem to be saying with all of their beings that the poor and unfortunate should just go away. Where? Who knows. Who cares. Higher death rates be damned, we have free market principles to defend here, so sod off and go suffer in front of someone else.

That cruelty, and not the people who have nowhere else to turn, is what causes so many of the social and health problems we see around us. Life isn't cruel, though humans can choose to be. Or not.

Sure, there are probably those who think that our highest-in-the-developed-world infant mortality rate and hordes of bankrupted sick people make America look tough or principled, but those people are stupid and wrong. They fail their brothers and sisters, they fail themselves, they fail all of us.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future