Wisconsin wingnut Charlie Sykes, as usual, has no idea what the fuck he’s blithering about.
Most apartments, even crappy ones, have at least a small shitty air conditioner and many will have a small, shitty microwave. Which incidentally you can buy both from a secondhand store for almost nothing, or get off Craigslist, or garbage-pick for when summer is over.
But this isn’t about the actual stuff or how life really works out here or what we consider poor. You see, if you can police someone else’s choices, then you don’t have to think about the system in which they made those choices. If you can carefully assure yourself that you, virtuous you, in that scenario would forgo a microwave or an air conditioner in order to, I don’t know, see, this is why this is so fucking dumb. If you take that money and you spend it on food or rent or gas, you’re still poor. Poor isn’t about what you buy, it’s about your income level relative to the surroundings.
This is the same lousy excuse-making that runs around investigating people’s countertops to see if they could afford health insurance, the same lousy excuse-making that’s not about the person being attacked at all. It’s about how Charlie, like most people who’ve never worried about making the rent or having the car repossessed, has to come up with a reason not to give a shit about anybody else, and this is it.
That they have microwaves, and air conditioning. If they’d just give those up, they’d either be magically rich like Charlie, or they’d be poor enough, surely, that we could feel sorry for them without reservation. Surely then we wouldn’t be able to come up with any other reasons at all that they don’t deserve our consideration.
A.
I love how wingnuts like Charlie Sykes seem to think barking into a microphone somehow qualifies as “hard work,” particularly when said “hard work” wouldn’t have much of an audience without significant government regulation.
Talk Radio = government welfare for fat old white reactionaries…
I work in affordable housing and one of my colleagues loves to carry on about tenants with flat screen TV’s. He bought a flat screen in 2002 for 4,500 bucks and was the first on his block to have one so he views it as a luxury item. I have to quietly remind him that almost every TV sold in the last five years is a flat screen TV and taht you can get them really cheap now-a-days.
didn’t you know. the poor shouldn’t have ANYTHING if they are POOR. maybe they can have a plastic bucket. i was thinking about hangers. do the poor need clothes hangers?
phg, for serious.
What if they got one as a gift, or inherited it? And again, secondhand stores. People who don’t shop in them or don’t have one near them have no idea the awesome shit you can pick up there, especially if you go to like the Goodwill in a rich neighborhood. If I told you I had a silver and crystal serving set, or some Limoges hand-painted china, you’d think that was a luxury, too, until I told you I pulled it out of a junk pile and bought it for about $2.00.
(Which is the only reason I have it, because the fuck am I going to do with china so delicate I’m afraid to look at it too hard? I’m a klutz who has broken just about every coffee mug I’ve owned.)
A.
estate sales are a bounty of ‘heirlooms’ too. i got my best sweaters from a resale shop. or favorite sweaters.