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Drew @sopuli.xyz

People are so horrible to homeless people for no reason

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  • A lot of people here are looking for a philosophical answer, but I personally think it’s really just a class issue. Most people in the US don’t like to hear it, but our class structure is practically a caste system.

    People generally despise the people of other classes (or castes), above or below. This is reinforced by segregation and media. Ultra Rich > Rich > Upper Class > Middle Class > Lower Class > Welfare Class > Homeless. All these groups live in separate communities with specific media environments that vilify the “others”. These groups only ever interact in ways with clear hierarchy. This is only exacerbated with the death of third spaces.

    Having been middle class and sliding down the ladder to the point of imminent homelessness, I’ve been struck by the fact that the distribution of assholes for each group is pretty much the same. Over and over again, I’ve seen nearly no contact between classes to dispel the images projected by each class’s respective media ecosystem.

    This country is so fundamentally segregated and divided that I really don’t know how it can be changed. There is really no clean and fair way to actually inform people about the similarities between people.

    • America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

      Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

      ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

      • That’s a good quote and I’ll have to take a read of the book, but I actually think this perspective is actually part of the problem I’m talking about. To the eye of a famous accomplished author, it would appear that people below them glorify and aspire to the people of his class.

        I mainly take issue with the gross oversimplification of all people below his financial status as poor and self hating. This was perhaps true at the time it was written, but I think the situation has changed since 1969 if this was true then. I think the problem isn’t really some kind of nebulous cultural inconsistency, but it’s a systemic failure in media like a said previously.

        Middle-ish class people don’t talk about how poor people deserve to be poor; not even in the very conservative area I live in. They just don’t talk about them at all. That is except in the context of a news story they heard and every news story only covers poverty in two contexts: crime and societal decay. Poor people and their communities are only shown as dangerous things that people should avoid. This is unfortunately true in a lot of ways, but not the whole story and it turns every poor person into a potential junkie, gang member, or crazy person who should be avoided.

        • Media is definitely to blame, especially if we go the other way in the way it worships celebrities as people worthy of praise for arguably doing not much and being in the right place at the right time whilst having the right connections. It gives an impossible ideal for success that appears to reward merit but mostly rewards narcissism and self-promotion, and tries to sell these as viable paths for young adults that is free for the taking for anyone of any background.

          I do also think that the middle-ish class are somewhat silently complicit, even if they say nothing bad about those less fortunate. They will never say anything bad, but they will also not allow for social housing to be built in their backyards whilst sympathetically tutting about it.

          I'd argue that the only thing that's changed since 1969 is the open hatred had the higher classes had to their poor, whereas now it's more a source of embarassment to shut out and not talk about.

    • I've lived on the streets, in a car, in a house with 10 people so we could cover rent, in slums and have crawled up to solidly middle class. I think it used to be easier to do that than it is now, like every year it gets more stratified with more slipping below average (meaning the mean) but also harder to dig out. Not impossible, but it was hard enough as person of able body and mind back then - I can't imagine how hard now.

      At work in my department only one of us has never been very poor, I do think there is some social mobility but for each of us there must be hundreds who did the same things and it didn't work.

    • The American de jure caste system is honestly one of the most disgusting truths to learn. Those people who become homeless do not often live long, prosperous lives wandering the streets. Either you get pulled out of it by intelligence/family/friends/luck, or you die. There is a never ending conveyor belt constantly pushing against our feet that feeds into a furnace fueled by blood. There's no reason we need to let our homeless die. We could establish a society where everyone is taken care of, but the capitalists at the top like using the threat of sliding down that conveyor belt against us. And so an entire caste of people exists to die.

      The entire system deserves to burn to the ground. I'm torn between my delight that it currently is, and my horror at the suffering the collapse will cause.

54 comments