Tim Barrus: New York Times: Jumping Off the Cliff
Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times is speaking about who and what American culture has left behind. I don’t think he sees much hope. If any. But he provides examples of hopefulness on the part of released prisoners.
Why.
Because he’s writing for an editor. I have written for hundreds of editors. I know all the tricks and all the smoke and all the mirrors.
Editor dancing. Usually, this is an editor who cannot write. You figure. They are only aware of structure and paradigms.
Providing the other side of the coin. Ex-cons are not the opposite side of the coin. They are the coin. Mass incarceration is neither a secret or a solution to anything.
Poverty itself is not a class. It is a pit from which there is no escape. The culture now lives in manufactured bubbles. The rich do not know the working class so much as exists. The people I know who have HIV, too, have no hope.The HIV crisis changed the way I see everything. Everything. The stereotype that it’s just gay men who deal with HIV is exactly that. A stereotype. The cost of the disease – just the medications – can still be thousands of dollars a month.The politically correct HIV helper orgs scream that everyone is hopeful and we can live normal lives.
What, exactly, is a normal life.
We create ghettos to stuff our problems in. No one talks about the fact that the new ghettos are the poor communities that spring up around public health clinics.
Because you don’t need a car to get there.
There is very little to be hopeful for. Americans just don’t believe it. There were very few voices that had anything to say when Trump virtually did away with SNAP – food stamps. This is a matter of hunger in America. We punish the poor at every turn. We can’t afford food stamps. Trump plays golf on our dime. There is hunger in America.
America is not so much as failing, it’s the culture of America that has already failed even if Americans don’t get it. What Americans get or do not get about how fundamental culture is – versus the symptoms of politics or class – is irrelevant. Example. Two words, and they’re not much articulated by the working class. But they affect the working class the most. Climate change.
It is far too late.