Think Before You Speak

[poliphilo]

Ailz has quit Facebook because she was tired to getting into spats with feather-bedded young people who think the poor would stop being poor if only the State treated them harshly enough. Take away their child benefit and- hey presto- no more children living in poverty- that sort of thing. Is it just my neighbourhood or are today's young people a lot more right-wing than we were?

It so happens I ran across a quote from Marx this morning. Boiled down to its essentials it was saying that the morality that obtains in any society is the morality that serves the interests of the ruling class. So, for example, it isn't theft to enclose common land but it is theft to poach a rabbit or a deer from the land-encloser. It makes you want to spit, doesn't it? Or at least it does if you sit down and think about it.  Only people don't think. They just swim around in the murk gulping down the intellectual fish food that drifts down from above by way of the Mail, the Telegraph and the BBC.

I seem to have Dickens on the mind at the moment but it strikes me that if only the feather-bedded young people would read him (he's easier than Marx) they might stop believing it was so cool to be cruel.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not really talking figures. And I'm not against the benefit cap as such. What I'm talking about is a culture in which the unemployed and those on benefits are demonized by government and in which people pick up on government rhetoric about scroungers and the workshy- as percolated through the right-wing press- and tweet it mindlessly.

I wouldn't say you were feather-bedded. You've always worked for your living- and you never got much in financial backing from your dear old dad.

[(Anonymous)]

And here's me thinking that your post was all aimed at Ailz's favourite neice. Judging from your response to Mike it can't be as I've had a job since I was 13 years old and I would not call everyone on benefits scroungers. Im glad Ive not been pigeon holed as 'right winged' as that it extremely insulting.
Yes, I agree with the benefit cap.
Yes, my parents are extremely supportive.
That's about as far as the comparison with this post goes.
I get child tax credits. I could not afford to work without them. A scrounger I am not!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I didn't read the stuff on Facebook- so this post is a kind of scatter-gun blast aimed vaguely in that direction. Ailz was upset. I responded. What I hate is the propaganda against people on benefits and the unemployed that starts in government, is amplified in the main-stream media and then appears all over the place in conversation- electronic and otherwise. A lot of people are suffering badly under the present regime and they don't have much of a voice. The rich have screwed us over by breaking the banks and plunging us into depression and its the poor- and the middle-classes too- who are being asked to carry the can. Bankers get their bonuses, MPs get a raise (as does the Queen) and the people at the bottom have their benefits cut.

As it says in the Music Hall song-

"It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor what gets the blame,
It's the rich what gets the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame?"

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yes, I could not agree more. Iv'e seen extremely high risk and vunerable children being pulled out of the home I work in over funding and budget cuts. It hits home hard to me and leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. I have never and would never 'swallow' conservative ideologies. Unfortunately it appears I have been tarred with the same brush as those that comment in a more right-winged fashion.
My mother (which you know would not entertain the 'cruel' culture) agreed with my stance and felt I put it across sensitively.

[craftyailz.livejournal.com]

I've been lucky and never been unemployed for more than a few weeks, but I have had a lot of time off sick - and got fired from a couple of jobs because of it. I also - when doing piece work had holidays when I didn't have the fare to get to work - after getting caught by the transport police not paying for the full journey. I, rarely, and others often, have lived on things like dry cornflakes for a week or more because that was all I had. My cat, Oscar, was fed even if I went hungry. That was when I was on the dole in Scotland.

If you don't have any money it gets worse as time goes on - how do you get to interviews, buy smart clothing for said interviews, afford a phone to call or leave a number for someone to ring you? It is reckoned that between 1 & 10% of the unemployed don't want to work and about the same of sick swindlers, but reading the papers you'd think it was the opposite way around and that most unemployed people are shirkers. I don't believe all I read,but I do read a wide variety of views on a subject that interests me. xx