Welfare Shmelfare
Posted by: Donna
I’ve been in an intermittently foul mood since Thursday night. I got talked into going to a happy hour by my co-worker. She said it would be a group of local businesswomen. I was a bit apprehensive, due to the probability that massive quantities of Chamber of Commerce koolaid will have been consumed by at least some of those in attendance but I didn’t think it would be too bad.
I was wrong. It was multitudes worse.
We’re sitting around the table sipping wine, and the subject of politics comes up. My associate and I are both Dems, though she’s considerably more centrist than I. Of our two drinking companions, one professed to be apolitical and the other was a Republican. We started with local stuff, then got into the war, 9-11, and economics.
I’m not good in these situations. I wish I could calmly and persuasively dispatch with the flawed reasoning that has become so pervasive in the public. I try to remember that a massive, well-funded, decades long effort has gone into planting stupid memes in the American mind. But when particular ones are repeated in my presence I just lose it. And these ladies managed to push most of my hot buttons.
I blew my stack when The Republican One blithely blamed unions for the woes of the auto industry. The Apolitical One wondered why everyone was picking on poor lil Bush for 9-11 when he’d only been in office for a mere 8 months when it happened and why wasn’t anyone blaming Clinton for it?
She. Seriously. Said. That.
So you can see why my brain is exploding throughout this whole thing. But those examples were mere prelude to the big detonation. A teeny cranio-munitional aperitif, if you will.
What really made me lose it was when The Republican One said something along the lines of the following: “I just can’t support the Democrats because they enable people being on welfare and I don’t want my tax dollars going to people who don’t work.”
AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGH!!!!!!!!!!!
Why, in 2007, are people still bringing up this tired old canard? Do these people realize that practically no one is on welfare anymore, since draconian welfare reform was enacted in the Clinton administration? Needless to say, I really let her have it. I asked her why, if she hates welfare so much, she would vote for billions of her tax dollars going to greedy no-bid defense contractors who are mostly doing nothing to rebuild Iraq or for our troops over there. I asked her why, if she was such a fiscal conservative, she would ever vote for Republicans. Had she even been paying attention to our current national debt?
Ultimately, I know that my words will have little long term impact because the welfare issue isn’t about government spending. It’s about race. “Welfare” is code for brown people. The Republicans (though the linked article shows that many prominent Dems have gone along with it too) have gotten a lot of mileage from exploiting the deep-seated racism of this country to their advantage. From Nixon’s Southern Strategy, to Reagan and his mythical Cadillac Driving Welfare Queens, to today’s immigrant bashing. To that end, they have skillfully conflated any kind of non-military government spending with welfare. And the “corporate welfare” idea - while a brilliant analogy - hasn’t taken hold as much as it should because wealthy CEOs are, for the most part, people who don’t look like stereotypical welfare recipients. (BTW, the majority of welfare recipients are actually Caucasian.)
Essentially, the message is: Government = Welfare = “Those People” lazing around on your dime!
This is the rubric of circular logic through which all too many voters view domestic policy. This is why arguments about the need to invest in the schools, public services like adequate police and emergency response, and our crumbling infrastructure will get you a blank stare or a polite nod, but a racially and culturally loaded concept like welfare will send people into an impassioned tirade.
Watch for the welfare meme to rear it’s ugly head anew in 2008. The Cadillac Driving Welfare Queen has already morphed into the Illegal Immigrant Welfare Chiseler. Watch for my head to explode repeatedly in the next year and a half.
Donna
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