The “barely got mine and defending it” thing really sticks in other ways too.
When I wanted aid for school “sorry, we ran out. Should have gotten here earlier.”
When I wanted to get food stamps “sorry, you don’t meet the qualifications on a technicality.”
When I finally got Medicaid but couldn’t use it “not enough spots for you to be seen, sorry.”
Many times the administrators that gave me this news implied it was because too many people asked for it. Being young and stupid (and let’s face it, indoctrinated), it made me put the blame on the other people asking for aid. If there were less people that asked for aid, I wouldn’t be starving and sick. I thought that I was more worthy of the aid because some people are cheating the system and I deeply resented them.
Fortunately I grew the hell up and pulled my head out of my ass. It’s all a distraction we get fed from the news that other needy people are the reason why we suffer. It’s so hard to fathom how much the rich actually waste when all we see is our fellow working class folk.
To add a voice to the choir, I was raised like this too. We went the other direction of feeling guilty for needing aid though.
Like they weren’t completely wrong, you really should be able to raise a family off a single full time job, the problem is that said jobs don’t pay enough for that. But the broken system is good at defending itself, and politicians are quick to point out all the ways it does work, so you wind up with a ‘well, it works for them, guess I just have to try harder’ mindset. Like, I spent hours each week as a teenager helping mom do the extreme couponing and do stuff like take a cart through another line to get around limits on sale items.
I’ve been shit at math for my whole life, so maybe I’m just hoping I’m not alone in this, but I really think a lot of people are number illiterate. I’ve spent so much time learning to be grateful for my shoe-string budget, I have a hard enough time envisioning double my salary, and that’d just make me middle class. I literally don’t have a way of conceptualizing what 200x my salary would be like.
The “barely got mine and defending it” thing really sticks in other ways too.
When I wanted aid for school “sorry, we ran out. Should have gotten here earlier.”
When I wanted to get food stamps “sorry, you don’t meet the qualifications on a technicality.”
When I finally got Medicaid but couldn’t use it “not enough spots for you to be seen, sorry.”
Many times the administrators that gave me this news implied it was because too many people asked for it. Being young and stupid (and let’s face it, indoctrinated), it made me put the blame on the other people asking for aid. If there were less people that asked for aid, I wouldn’t be starving and sick. I thought that I was more worthy of the aid because some people are cheating the system and I deeply resented them.
Fortunately I grew the hell up and pulled my head out of my ass. It’s all a distraction we get fed from the news that other needy people are the reason why we suffer. It’s so hard to fathom how much the rich actually waste when all we see is our fellow working class folk.
To add a voice to the choir, I was raised like this too. We went the other direction of feeling guilty for needing aid though.
Like they weren’t completely wrong, you really should be able to raise a family off a single full time job, the problem is that said jobs don’t pay enough for that. But the broken system is good at defending itself, and politicians are quick to point out all the ways it does work, so you wind up with a ‘well, it works for them, guess I just have to try harder’ mindset. Like, I spent hours each week as a teenager helping mom do the extreme couponing and do stuff like take a cart through another line to get around limits on sale items.
I’ve been shit at math for my whole life, so maybe I’m just hoping I’m not alone in this, but I really think a lot of people are number illiterate. I’ve spent so much time learning to be grateful for my shoe-string budget, I have a hard enough time envisioning double my salary, and that’d just make me middle class. I literally don’t have a way of conceptualizing what 200x my salary would be like.