Here is a big secret – poor people, among others, don’t generally imagine that political candidates care about them.
Because they don’t. Let’s be real here they don’t care about them. Neither does the author. You can’t care about that many people. Political Candidates have an abstract idea of people in the general situation you’re probably in and an opinion about how to help you that can range anywhere from well informed and grounded to delusional and based in stereotypes, but it’s not physically possible for them to care about ‘you’ in any meaningful way unless you happen to be a person they have some kind of direct relationship with. Poor or formally poor people are some of the worst for this, because their model of what poverty looks and feels like is based on their own experience, and that’s not how poverty works.
There’s an old saying that every functional family is functionally the same, but every dysfunctional family is fucked up in its own unique way. Poverty is also kind of like that, but you don’t always see what’s broken in every case, and when what works or would have worked for you, doesn’t help any of your neighbours, familiarity starts to breed contempt.
I do think we need to find a way to listen better to those on the bottom, I absolutely do. But I don’t buy the story that it takes a G to understand a G. You know your case. You know your brothers and sisters, but you don’t know the guy down the street whose got a whole different set of obstacles in front of him, even if his house is just as run down and in dire need as yours. We do need to listen. We need to find the common threads that we can pull to help bring people up, but it’s not always going to be obvious to anyone which of those threads are the right one to do the most good. We figure that out by asking questions and finding the patterns in what people are telling you.
Seeing a face that you can trust is important, I won’t discount that, because it’s true. But, forgive me for this, but I’m not going to ask someone who can’t read how to set up a school literacy program. We need to work together to find a way to bring those skills and that experience together and build something that works better than what got us here.
Because they don’t. Let’s be real here they don’t care about them. Neither does the author. You can’t care about that many people. Political Candidates have an abstract idea of people in the general situation you’re probably in and an opinion about how to help you that can range anywhere from well informed and grounded to delusional and based in stereotypes, but it’s not physically possible for them to care about ‘you’ in any meaningful way unless you happen to be a person they have some kind of direct relationship with. Poor or formally poor people are some of the worst for this, because their model of what poverty looks and feels like is based on their own experience, and that’s not how poverty works.
There’s an old saying that every functional family is functionally the same, but every dysfunctional family is fucked up in its own unique way. Poverty is also kind of like that, but you don’t always see what’s broken in every case, and when what works or would have worked for you, doesn’t help any of your neighbours, familiarity starts to breed contempt.
I do think we need to find a way to listen better to those on the bottom, I absolutely do. But I don’t buy the story that it takes a G to understand a G. You know your case. You know your brothers and sisters, but you don’t know the guy down the street whose got a whole different set of obstacles in front of him, even if his house is just as run down and in dire need as yours. We do need to listen. We need to find the common threads that we can pull to help bring people up, but it’s not always going to be obvious to anyone which of those threads are the right one to do the most good. We figure that out by asking questions and finding the patterns in what people are telling you.
Seeing a face that you can trust is important, I won’t discount that, because it’s true. But, forgive me for this, but I’m not going to ask someone who can’t read how to set up a school literacy program. We need to work together to find a way to bring those skills and that experience together and build something that works better than what got us here.