Recently, I saw some off-hand post about how much better Japan was doing after its disaster than New Orleans was doing. I didn’t look beyond that to see whether there was anything like an apples-to-apples comparison going on. It just mentioned that “some parts” of New Orleans were still a wreck. And, some parts of Japan are not — I’m sure some parts of Japan are still in bad shape.
I threw out a glib remark, saying “Maybe it’s because their Constitution renounces war, freeing up resources for useful things.” The response to that was pretty revealing. “Maybe it’s because Japanese people are not afraid to roll their own sleeves up and get to work, unlike lazy government freeloaders in New Orleans.”
My response was “Uppity, shiftless freeloaders, no doubt.”
I’m not one to see racism under every rock, but there was certainly some of that going on here.
Of course, I have my own perception of difference between how the Japanese seem to react to a crisis versus our own. I was struck by the story recently in the news about how some of Japan’s elderly were volunteering to work in the radioactive areas, reasoning that the damage from radiation took some time to manifest and probably wouldn’t be felt until after they’d likely be dead in any case. I just can’t see something like that happening in the U.S.
But, that may well be because I’m afflicted by stereotypes as well. I have in my head a caricature of an older American formed by the summer of discontent over the health care reform debate — along the lines of an overweight white person in a hover-round shrieking about keeping government out of their Medicare. Such a person is mortally concerned over the prospect that someone, not them obviously, might be getting away with something. It’s the specter of the young buck using food stamps to buy T-bones and the welfare queen driving a Cadillac.
I don’t know if my stereotype is any more a reality than the Reagan-era welfare imagery is. But the stereotypes are powerful and shape our political discourse.
It’s your mind reading powers that are really impressive.
Are you the Shadow? Can you always tell what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
Quite a piece of detective work on my part, I confess. Real Sherlock Holmes levels of deduction.
Not to diss your sleuthing powers, Doug, but some things are pretty easy to spot. Since Obama’s election, a lot of previously suppressed racism has become pretty obvious.
Yes, Sheila – but enough about Eric Holder…
Racist or not, is it wrong?
I feel the same way about Gary. There is no one in Gary capable of solving the problems of Gary, which, quite frankly, starts with shiftlessness, or more precisely, low future time orientation amongst the poor, which manifests itself in a myriad number of problems (drug use, criminality, low levels of educational achievement, etc. etc. etc.)
You can write this off as racism, but I hardly think that this is only a problem with African-Americans. It is a problem with the poor of every race, and not just in the US. It is just that the US has achieved a level of economic development where there really aren’t people who are poor for economic reasons. They are poor because of their behaviors, due to poor future time orientation.
The opportunity that New Orleans had was that the concentrated poverty was dispersed. I happen to think that one way to improve folks future time orientation is to get them away from others with poor future time orientation. Moving from the city to the ‘burbs has a tendency to do that.
I think that’s a fair point, Buzz. One thing I notice a lot about my collection defendants is that they are awful planners.
That said, I think in the U.S. we don’t tend to reward or celebrate hard work and delayed gratification structurally or culturally. You can make more money being born into the right family, playing the Wall Street casino, or being a professional athlete than you can being frugal and grinding it out year after year. Our celebrated cultural icons tend not to be wise elders who followed the rules and paid their dues.
I think in the U.S. we don’t tend to reward or celebrate hard work and delayed gratification structurally or culturally. You can make more money being born into the right family, playing the Wall Street casino, or being a professional athlete than you can being frugal and grinding it out year after year. Our celebrated cultural icons tend not to be wise elders who followed the rules and paid their dues.
The media glorifies anything that is glamorous, wealth is glamorous, especially wealth that is flaunted, which is entertaining.
But that doesn’t mean that being frugal or investing in Wall Street in a non-glamorous way (indexing, dollar cost averaging) as a way to wealth is some kind of mystery. Have you ever read Money magazine? Ever seen the personal finance section at your local library?
The bottom line, Doug, is that you are making excuses for people. “The system did it to you”. Or the subject of this post, that “racist” people are still somehow to blame for the plight of the poor in this country, when in fact the bar that you set as “racist” is laughable.
And when you have no expectations for people, they live up to your expectations. And then YOU become the true cause of the miserable lives that poor people live, all because you are too blind or too squeamish to say the things that need to be said, usually because people like you throw around the “racist” word so casually.
BTW, you know a good way to encourage hard work? Don’t punish it through the tax system. Realize that the vast majority of people come to their wealth through their own hard work and future time orientation.