I think it’s really important to clarify something. Because if you do not think about it, what I wrote last time can be interpreted as quite ridiculous or silly and easily dismissive, because you can put the sole responsibility on the person partaking in the action. Which I find silly, a person is not their own little island disconnected from the world. We are shaped by the world, we do not choose where to be born or what material wealth to be born with. So, if you are born into a toxic environment, and I do not mean that as in Flint, Michigan, I mean in a family with trauma, bad habits, bad coping mechanism, violence, abuses and lack of access to good education, healthy relationships, healthy food, good jobs, good public transport. Well then, your chances are royally high to not do very well in life. Especially when the system does not care to fix the problem it created and it thrives off the racism and abuse. You can find many such examples, where communities were left to starve out and get poorer, only for capital to move in, buy property cheap and evict everyone. Since they cut out public transport and funds to the area and cut the community from any jobs or prospects, the place got poorer and people couldn’t afford anything anymore. This is not a bug, this is a feature of the system. You can see these practices everywhere. And you can not fight that on your own. Meaning, you can ride your high horse to stoicism as much as you want, but if there is a system out there which allows for such behavior, and you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, there’s not much you can do. Those that escape are very few. Because the system does not help you.
Here also lies the hypocrisy of those that preach the “pull yourself by the bootstraps” lie. There are no bootstraps in these situations, no one will hire you, no one will educate you for free, no one will shelter you. There are plenty of studies to show that the only remedy is money being poured into these communities to lift them up and when you do the state makes bank. Because investing in people always produces a positive outcome. The same goes for the homeless problem, there are no bootstraps to pull yourself out of being homeless without great help and effort from others. And even then, without long term support, the possibility of going backwards is always real. Because to get over these things people need time to heal. So when you hear someone “Well, they should’ve been useful and work harder in order not to get here” that is bullshit. I live in a town where I can’t afford to buy a home, I make more than the medium income of the city, but when the greed of the system is to such a great height, there is no helping it. I might be working, but I need at least another job that pays just as well for me to even think about affording a home here. Because when the anual median salary in the county is 700-800 euros but housing starts at 100.000, there is nothing you can do except work yourself to death for something that shouldn’t be this expensive for such low wages. Now think about a homeless person or someone poor with no savings, because they were born in a poor place with no jobs prospects, with poor education, with no or bad public transport making it out. You have to be lucky to make it out and you have to struggle an inhumane amount in order to create that chance. And if housing is that expensive in a place that might have all you need, you might not make it there, cause you won’t be able to afford it. Now for the hypocrisy, those that have managed to escape will look at this and dismiss it, either because they were lucky enough to work hard at the right time, get the fruits of their labor and managed to still buy housing before the prices jumped up in an obscene amount of manner. Or they got out when things were still relatively cheap and you could afford to move from bumfuck-no-name-town to a big city, struggle, but still make it from month to month with relative ease. And the same people enjoyed meeting the right people at the right time. Most people do not interact with those that are down or uneducated or have an addiction or any sort of acute mental problem. So their chances to “pull themselves by the bootstraps by networking, working hard, taking care of themselves” is kind of a meaningless statement these people make to brush off their own hypocrisy and downplay the role timing and luck had in their own development. Thus downplaying the privilege they enjoy now and how time has changed enough to where to replicate what they did is nearly impossible.
But that’s just a small part which needed a lot of explaining. Now to hit home my point about how we are all responsible I have a few more easily self-explainable examples for you all.
You have a child, you send it to school, there is a bully that bullies your child. Your kid comes crying, what do you do? You have a coworker that keeps sexually abusing another coworker, what do you do? You have a child, they go to school, comes out a teacher there sexually abused children, what do you do? The same happens at your local church. You are at home, you hear your neighbor screaming and beating his wife, what do you do? You see someone beating someone else on the street, what do you do? You see someone stealing the purse from someone, what do you do? You see your brother or sister abusing alcohol, what do you do? You see a dear friend who hit some hard times, now he got addicted to gambling, what do you do? You see a successful friend with money get disillusioned with life and get addicted to drugs, what do you do? These are all things you are surrounded by right now. These things are happening to someone you know somewhere near you right now. What is this society doing to and for those people? You don’t know. Why? Because your answer to the question what do you do is probably “I don’t know”. Because we don’t have an education about what to do in these situations. The system isn’t built to protect, serve and help really anyone that can’t do that for themselves. Which means the institutions meant to protect us and do all that are either incompetent at best, corrupt and badly funded at worst, but in either case, it makes them useless. And this is on purpose, a violent system needs violence at all levels of society for it to work and justify itself. That’s why there’s a “war” on education, identity, Christmas, religion, millennials, gen z, gen alpha, this, that. Strife, division and violence is a feature of the system to keep us engaged in its violence. Which is where the idea of personal responsibility needs to be broader than just “me”. Because this world and how it is, involves all of us on all levels. And these divisions are silly if you take a second to actually think about them.
Sunita Williams:
“You don't see any borders between countries from space”