If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.
But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
[…]People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…]
That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
Tag: classism
People arguing that the poor shouldn’t have kids and that benefits should be cut from kids in families with “too many kids” are being super obvious that they don’t think of poor people as fully human. And also that they’re into genocide (it’s not like we live in a world where poverty, deprivation, and lack of access to resources is evenly distributed across all racial/ethnic groups and we all fucking know that).
Rights like being able to have a family, to raise children, to continue our families and cultures are basic parts of human rights that people should be able to choose to engage in (or not, if that’s their preference, but they shouldn’t be coerced not to).
Banning someone from having kids or starting a family or coercing them not to is an incredibly cruel thing to do to someone. And that’s what people are doing when they suggest poor people shouldn’t have kids. Rich people and classist assholes act like the choice is between having kids in poverty or having kids not in poverty and that’s just not how things go in reality. Most people born in poverty will remain in poverty or close to it. The choice to have kids and start a family outside of poverty is one denied to most people.
And don’t concern troll about the welfare of poor kids if you’re trying to cut their food, housing, education, etc. and if you see them as garbage drains on society. Concern for poor children is totally fucking unrelated to ruling class desires to control poor people and to victim blame poor people for poverty.
Poor people having kids isn’t what creates poverty, poverty is the result of systematic exploitation and a fucked up inhumane system. Kids born to the poor are as valuable and human as any other child, and poor people have as much rights to things like having a family as any other human being.
the Big Secret is that lifting people out of poverty is actually cheaper than keeping them poor. living wages invigorate the economy. paying for food and housing for the poorest among us, no questions asked, gets them off welfare and back into the job market much faster. the bureaucracy designed to weed out the ‘undeserving’ costs arguably more than the benefits paid out, and having to reapply and jump through hoops continually, getting their food and medicine randomly cut off, makes people on benefits far less able to recover and go back to work. lack of health care costs the country billions more than universal health care would cost; it’s just that the cost of so many sick people is easier to hide in the statistics.
it’s not about money. it’s about power.
or rather, it’s about oligarchs tricking citizens into spending their own money to keep their neighbors poor. it isn’t the rich who subsidize corporations who pay below living wage. it’s you. it’s your taxes that are paying for cheeto hitler to take multi-million dollar vacations every damn weekend while he and his billionaire cronies promise you that cutting school lunch will make you more secure. it won’t. you’re next.
just moving along like everyone else 