erisiansaint

So, Jonathan Swift wrote a book called A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public back in 1729. It was a lovely bit of satire, describing people in a grinding state of poverty and suggesting that we eat their children. Really lovely work. You can read it here. (For the record, this post is the culmination of a conversation with someone else who read the piece. I'm not naming names, because I don't want to cause drama for the person.)

Now, last night, I read a piece by someone who does not like Obama, thought Bush was a great president, and is offended that people think they have both a right to privacy in order to have abortions and a right to health care for the children who are born. Meanwhile, this is not a person who adopts children or even fosters them. This person obviously thinks abortion is murder, but if you have the temerity to be conceived and born, whatever happens to you after birth is obviously your own lookout. This person is offended that pharmacists might have to give out birth control, in spite of their own religion, that they might have to do the job they signed up for, but has no problem ignoring the fact that not every religion in this country believes that birth control is bad, or that sex is bad.

This person did not leave space for dissenting opinions, probably because of me: I have a hard time not pointing out when someone has their head stuffed firmly up their posterior, and I'm fairly blunt about my positions, as well as loud.

However, I'm starting to get the urge to mail A Modest Proposal to various congresscritters, and maybe throw a copy to this person, as well. Because what the hell! Why not turn women into cows? Babies would make an excellent alternative to veal or sea kittens, and it would cut down on all the problems with social services: stick the poor people onto farms! They emit less methane than cows, so we'd take care of some global warming. They eat more crops, so farms would be forced to diversify, but the farmers would make more money because the poor people would be labor, as well as food-bearing livestock. You wouldn't need welfare or health care, because you'd have vets and just slaughter the livestock when it's past its working prime. Urban overcrowding would be gone. Shortages? Gone. It'd solve all problems! PETA'd have a field day, because you could quit eating chickens, cows, pigs, or sea kittens.

Yeah. I'm starting to like this idea.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Date: 2009-01-17 09:15 pm (UTC)

From:

siliconshaman.livejournal.com

no subject

People like are why Swift wrote that... things have not changed.

Date: 2009-01-17 11:22 pm (UTC)

erisiansaint

I know. But it's SAD that people still don't get it. I get so tired of the insensitive saying that poor people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, when the people might not even have BOOTS. Where's their so-called Christian charity?

Date: 2009-01-17 11:36 pm (UTC)

Eh.. times change, people don't.

Or to put it a little less succinctly.. people are poor largely though no fault of their own. Sure, sometimes they make poor decisions, and that's largely the fault of not being educated enough. Or though having no good choices to make.

Thing is, life is random, chaotic and frequently you end up in the shitter for no reason at all. Just because it had to happen to someone. At the other end, the rich generally get rich my exploiting the poor.

So, those with, have this underlying dread of it happening to them, and feel they need to justify screwing those unfortunate enough to be the have-not's. [well, either that or they just don't give a shit really.]

End result... those with money and power invent reasons for the poor to be poor, they must have done something wrong to deserve it, or they must be somehow less clever, less adept, or less human... Ergo, oh hey, we don't have to feel sorry for them..and we totally deserve what we've got!

Since none of this inequality has fundamentally changed since Swift's time.. you still get jerks like the guy mentioned. "I've got mine, so those horrid poor people can just hurry up and die, and decrease the surplus population!" [to quote another author]