A dinner conversation that's still bothering me. [View all]

[TygrBright]

We were dining out with friends tonight. One of them has been paying attention to media coverage focused on the "why" of white, low-income people who voted for >redacted<.

She told the story of a Louisiana >redacted< voter who was spending time in Yerp, where they don't have "real" news, like, yanno, Faux. And most of what they have is in furrin' language, so her only choice for teevee news was, apparently, the Yerpeen CNN service.

The >redacted< voter had just never seen anything like it. That Christiane Amanpour woman was doing a segment on the famine in Africa. She had a little African kid, rake-skinny, bloat-bellied, dull-eyed, sitting next to her while she recounted the terrible conditions in the famine zones and how many Africans were affected.

The >redacted< voter's take on this?

That Christiane Amanpour was trying to make HER, the >redacted< voter, FEEL GUILTY about the famine. Like the famine was somehow on HER, the >redacted< voter, and it was somehow up to HER, the >redacted< voter, to feel bad and do something about it, with HER hard-earned money that she needed to help HER family and HER relatives who were terribly victimized by the bad unfair system in America that only helps undeserving welfare people and not people like her and her family.

And this friend, the one who was recounting this to me, said that the coverage she'd seen of people like this woman, and the terrible economic conditions in Louisiana, and their 'unique' culture, and the generational poverty they struggle with, and the devastation of their environment and everything, well... it doesn't EXCUSE their woolhat assholery, but it kinda made it, yanno, understandable.

And that just pushed my button.

"Look," I said, "my Dad's family were 'Cadian. Sure, Minnesota French Canuck, but that's 'Cadian, we had oyster stew for Christmas dinner and frog leg fries for 4th of July, and my Dad's Gran'mere spoke 'Becoise more than English. Don't tell me it's the culture.

And we were poor. After he got out of the Marines my Dad had a hard time holding a good job. We scraped. My Mom had to work, in an era when women didn't do that much.

We wore hand-me-downs. We had "cowboy hash" for dinner all too often (Mom used to call leftovers baked in a casserole with lima beans and tomato soup "cowboy hash" to get us to eat it.) We got socks and coloring books for Christmas some years, not the cool toys. We brought sack lunches of baloney or peanut butter, or went home to eat canned soup for lunch.

But here's the thing. Each one of us kids was given a piggy bank. And there was a bigger piggy bank on the sideboard. The 'rents put their spare change in that one. We were supposed to put at least a nickel from every allowance in ours, plus "found" pennies and any other money we could.

And a couple of times a year, we'd empty those piggy banks, and send the money to help kids who were... wait for it... yep, starving in Africa.

So, no. It's not understandable to me."

And it's still not.

But it makes me wonder: When did that stuff change? And how? At what level, did it stop being important for good parents to teach their kids about compassion, empathy, and connection with other parts of the world?

WTF?

uncomprehendingly,
Bright