This is the ultimate example of reducing the individual from a person to a thing in the capitalist system, which is in and of itself an act of evil. A free man works to live, a slave lives to work. By eliminating all forms of recreation from the life of the poor, you are reducing them to the moral level of a slave within society. You are also denying them freedom of speech and association, and the right to act like other human beings, which includes releasing the stress of modern life through recreation, even if it means acting not illegally, but "badly." We so often forget that if we permit one group to lose their rights, no matter how reasonable the explanation for doing so, all we are doing is setting ourselves up to have our own rights taken away in the future. First the poor; then the working class; and finally the pitiful remnants of America's middle-class.
Ms. Cooper explains what the real worldview of these reactionaries is:
Apparently, struggling to keep a roof over one's head, stay safe and healthy, eat well, and find good jobs or schools is not a sufficient enough struggle. Instead political conservatives want to create structural pathways to struggle and displeasure as a punishment for being poor. Rather than attend to the systemic causes of poverty, they remain firmly committed to a stance that has no political integrity: that poverty is caused by laziness -- not by poor schools, over-criminalization, the outsourcing of jobs, and a lack of living wage. And lazy people, the thinking goes, don't deserve any forms of pleasure. Moreover, their children should also be restricted from accessing pools and amusement parks, because clearly, the poor shouldn't be having children to begin with.
Finally, Ms. Cooper places it all into perspective in three paragraphs that have the impact of a cruise missile:
But there is, I think, a deeper psychology at play here as well. The middle class in this country is shrinking and the wealth gap is widening. Americans work longer and harder than we ever have before. I cannot think of one friend I know who is not inordinately busy, and while many have written about the seductions of"busyness, I think that there are"structural reasons at the heart of it, and one of the main causes of busyness is the pervasive philosophy of austerity. Austerity measures work in part by making us believe that we have to work harder and harder to justify our value to corporations and institutions that want to give us less and less. The rise in automation at our jobs means that in many professions, one person does the job that two or three people would have been paid to do 20 years ago. But the salary increase is not commensurate with the increase in [the amount of work done].
Those of us solidly situated in the middle class work harder and harder with less [and less] to show for it. That can only be justified [by us] at a psychological level if there are clear demarcations of value. So when we look at the poor, their lives need to look appreciably more difficult than ours, in order for our lives to look like middle-class lives.
As I have often pointed out many times before--most recently in my OpEdNews article, "Of Prophets and Loss," British critic and author John Berger wrote in 1990 of the real underlying problem with being poor in modern society: "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing." ("The Soul and the Operator," in Expressen, Stockholm; March 19, 1990; reprinted in Keeping a Rendezvous, 1992.)
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