It's starting to occur to me that for me many journalists, activists, political folk, that their concerns around poverty are not really genuine. That for a lot of such folks, it is pity in part based around guilt for how shitty they have treated people in their lives.
As someone who grew up poor and who has experienced serious enough adult poverty, all I can say about that is that no poor person wants anyone's pity. In fact, it is probably the single most important concern that most poor people I know have: not being pitied.
What bothers me about that state of affairs is that what most poor people want more than anything else is to just be treated better, and then to be left alone to make their own choices with their own lives.
But, instead, what they get is pity from more educated advocates on their behalf that they generally haven't asked for and a political period that rationalizes poor treatment of everyone, poor or not.
It is all of our worst impulses treated as if they are more noble than they are. Plenty of good intentions. But not nearly as honest an engagement of whether good intentions result in good consequences.
Most of the poor people I grew up with would want people to put away their pity and focus more on treating people better (though, honestly, many poor people do not treat people very well either; poor people come in all shapes and sizes, too).
How nice it would be for advocacy like this to be genuine; to have people treat other people, poor or not, as individuals and on their merits. And without pity.
If you have never been poor, you may not know the singular indignity that is associated with people pitying you, even when you have much to offer. Poor people generally know that such pity is unworthy of their dignity. And so is all of the bad treatment rationalized as tough love, these days.
Martin Anderson, a 14-year-old boy in Panama City, Florida, died in a state-run boot camp in the name of our rationalizations of "tough love." Love that resulted in his death. I, still, to this day, have not seen anyone take responsibility for his death. All in the name of responsibility. And tough. And love.
We owe it to Martin to face up to this legacy.
But to do so means to face ourselves in a way that I'm not convinced most people have the courage to do. I suppose the irony is that none of us feel love for ourselves or others, enough, to show that kind of courage. But I'm not interested in Martin dying so all of us can pretend that we had nothing to do with his death. Every single person who encouraged the kind and culture of toughness and bullying that resulted in Martin's death are responsible. And I don't really give a shit, anymore, whether people have the courage to take responsibility for that or not.
Kids like Martin don't need pity. Or tough love. Kid like Martin need people around them who genuinely care about them. There's no way that Martin could have died the way he did with people who genuinely cared about him. But we've become convinced in our hubris and our self-righteous clamoring for tough more than love or thoughtfulness or decency or any of our better impulses and higher values that all of our bullying and pressure and force are better or do better than they really do.
Sounds a lot like other regimes I know. Regimes that sacrafice people - their lives, their freedom, their dignity - all in the name of helping them all or making their own kind strong. Regimes that became corrupted by power, and corrupted more absolutely the more power they had.
The greatest tragedy of the early 21st century is that we spent almost a hundred years trying to remove that ugliness from the world. Only to repeat it ourselves.
And Martin Anderson hangs there like a once living testament to our hubris. He waits for us to take responsibility. But, sadly, noone is likely to do so. Because this period isn't about taking responsibility at all. It is about rationalizing our most vengeful, ugly, illiberal impulses all in the name of patting ourselves on the back for our liberal values.
That is the great tragedy of the early 21st century.
If we can't forgive ourselves for this ugliness, I only hope that Martin Anderson can.
Love,
Ben
