7.31.2004

Open letter to the socially conservative:

I hear you. I hear you when you say that you don't want YOUR hard-earned money being given to the government to pay for social programs for those who need help from the government. Yeah, I know, I know that you work hard every day from 9 to 5 in your suffocating suit with a noose around your neck to make your money and you don't want it going to the lazy people who sit around watching TV all day and leeching off of the government. You don't want your money spent on them.

It doesn't affect you. The human plight on the wrong side of the tracks doesn't affect you because you were born to successful families headed by businessmen, doctors, lawyers, salesmen. You were enrolled in a school where you got individuial attention from the get-go, and I will bet that you had a mother who stayed home from work to help you grow in the right direction. Did you think about where your college tuition came from? Did you ever question that you would be ABLE to go to college? Or did you just have to decide which one you thought had the best parties?

Did you go into work with your parents? Inherit a business? Did you get the job that you have now because of connections that your family has? The unearned luxury of knowing the right people? Did you ever have to entertain the fact that you may have to work more than one job just to pay your bills? No, you probaby didn't. So it's no wonder you don't want your hard-earned money to go to help those people in those other neighborhoods. You could never understand them. You have never walked one second in their shoes.

You did not have to grow up in a single-parent family where your mother had to decide wether to "be lazy" and stay at home, accepting help from the government so that she would be there when you walked home from school so that you would have somewhere to go that is safe rather than seeking family outside of your home in your neighborhood streets, joining a gang because every child will seek family somewhere. Or she could have chosen to get a job, leaving you with a key to an empty house every day after school since we are dropping the after-school program funding in this counrty.

No, no one in your family ever had to make those decisions. You were born outside of the vicious cycle of poverty that,like an undertow, grabs hold and sucks constantly downward from the first breath that you take and allows virtually no one up for air and out of the lower class. Social programs do not affect you.

It doesn't affect you when we kick kids out of their after school programs. It doesn't affect you when a single mother has to leave her child to be raised by the streets until she comes home at night, exhausted from a hard job that doesn't pay enough. It doesn't affect you that the ban on the sale of assault rifles is about to be lifted. And it doesn't affect you that our public school system has become an abomination, breeding contempt and violence and continued ignorance, leaving poor children with no hope of ever getting ahead in this country.

It doesn't affect you.

Until you walk to your luxury car from a party one night, and you find yourself with the barrel of a gun rammed into your ribcage. A desperate, disenfranchised, uneducated, and hopeless son or daughter of "the lazy people"across the tracks with their finger on the trigger. And do you think that they have any reason for not pulling that trigger? They don't. They have no hope. They have no possibility to know anything different in their lives. And they hate you because you have never had to struggle. What reason do they have to not make one split decision the wrong way and spill your priviledged blood across the dirty sidewalk?

But, no. I hear you. You don't want your hard-earned money being given to people who are lazy and sit around watching tv. You don't need to help fund public schooling because your kid goes to Montessori school. You don't care that those other neighborhoods are becoming war zones with not enough police force to patrol them. You're right. It just doesn't affect you.


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