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Rant du Jour
Jul. 8th, 2005 01:52 pmTopic: bashing a person for characteristics which are outside her control or caused by circumstances outside her control.
Example: "trailer trash." God, how I loathe that term. If you hypothesize a woman (gee, why do most "trailer trash" references point at females rather than males) who was raised in extreme poverty where child abuse was a community norm (poverty is linked to child abuse and other forms of violence, most likely because poverty causes extreme amounts of stress and extreme amounts of stress cause about ten bazillion bad things) with little or no access to a decent education or healthcare or pretty much any of the things that a middleclass or even upper-lowerclass person expects to be universally available... there will be some predictable effects regardless of her individual intelligence, resolve, creativity, drive, what have you.
Condemn those effects, sure. Shout and rant how awful it is that some people consider horrible things to be all they can ever expect to have. Don't label a human being as disposable, disgusting, or otherwise far-inferior-to-you because of something which she did NOT choose.
IF she later gets access to things like education, healthcare, and a few glimmers of hope that her efforts will actually make some positive difference in her life, she may be able to climb out of the pit she was born into. Or maybe the damage from those formative years goes pretty deep. I'm sure nobody has ever met a lazy, self-centered, unmotivated person who happens to be financially well-off. Oh wait, we have, but it doesn't stick in our consciousness like the "lazy welfare case" because we don't get to feel superior to the "lazy millionaire".
Example: "trailer trash." God, how I loathe that term. If you hypothesize a woman (gee, why do most "trailer trash" references point at females rather than males) who was raised in extreme poverty where child abuse was a community norm (poverty is linked to child abuse and other forms of violence, most likely because poverty causes extreme amounts of stress and extreme amounts of stress cause about ten bazillion bad things) with little or no access to a decent education or healthcare or pretty much any of the things that a middleclass or even upper-lowerclass person expects to be universally available... there will be some predictable effects regardless of her individual intelligence, resolve, creativity, drive, what have you.
Condemn those effects, sure. Shout and rant how awful it is that some people consider horrible things to be all they can ever expect to have. Don't label a human being as disposable, disgusting, or otherwise far-inferior-to-you because of something which she did NOT choose.
IF she later gets access to things like education, healthcare, and a few glimmers of hope that her efforts will actually make some positive difference in her life, she may be able to climb out of the pit she was born into. Or maybe the damage from those formative years goes pretty deep. I'm sure nobody has ever met a lazy, self-centered, unmotivated person who happens to be financially well-off. Oh wait, we have, but it doesn't stick in our consciousness like the "lazy welfare case" because we don't get to feel superior to the "lazy millionaire".
