We must stop volunteering and giving.
Who's "we"? Probably you. And me. And anybody who has 10 bucks, ten thousand, or one million left over at the end of each month when the bills are paid.
Why? Because you cannot authentically care and commit to poor people if you aren't one step ahead of the repo man and a regular at the Goodwill give-out window. A house with more bedrooms than family members? Stop volunteering, stop caring--you haven't earned it. Already set for retirement, college tuition for the kids? Stop it. Been on vacation lately and been a Big Brother™ or Big Sister™? You cynical damn hypocrite...
That's what the media would have us believe.
Yes, to care about poverty, you must be poor. It's an interesting flip of the Christian ethic and the words of Emma Lazarus. If we believe Chris Matthews, the AP and countless other journalists, America is really a massive hype, a shameless poser. As a rich country, the world's richest, our whole reason for being is a PR sham when we "pretend" to care. Sure, people come here by plane, train, boat or over a fence for opportunity and to escape poverty or oppressive states. They should stop immediately; they shoud realize they're not getting the real experience of being freed from need. Fools! They come for in-authentic prosperity. In order to embrace them, to understand them, to help them, we must forgo the blackberries, plasma screens and air conditioning. We must not make money or, when we make it, we must give it away and live under a bridge. The narrative demands it. And, if and when these foolish mirage-chasers of artificial, in-authentic prosperity achieve their dream--don't even think about reaching back to help your fellow citizen. Or, if you do, get out the sack cloth, empty you bank account, and fling the money out the window as you ride the bus to the ghetto or hamlet or foodbank you so selfishly wish to aid. You will ride the bus, right?
You must for it to be real. Their example, John Edwards. He has money. He was once poor, but now he has money. One might usually look upon his rise as making him especially qualified to talk about the promise of America as well as the nagging poverty and need in the midst of so much plenty.
No. He has money. That makes him suspect. He is inauthentic because he gets $400 haircuts. (The shades of half-story seep in here, akin to Al Gore's internet troubles h/t DDay.) The $400 figure is the result of the hairstylist leaving his shop and forgoing other paying clients while away. If you want a housecall from a computer repair tech instead o "bringing it in", you're gonna pay premium for monopolizing their time too. It's why retainer fees were were invented. Yeah, nothing novel at all. But...
But, as we see, that's a fact, and facts, like the common-sense ecomonics of supply and demand--of high-priced house calls by a hair cutter with a shop he must leave--well, those are inconvenient and too nuanced. They short-circuit the clever cutting line; they are too... logical.
Therefore, let us say "Screw logic."
And, let us embrace the media's alternative logic: If one must be poor to be credible on poverty, then one must also have heard a shot fired in anger--have actually served in the military--to speak and decide credibly on our nation's military issues. And only Sanjay Gupta can talk about health. Only Presidents can judge how hard presidentin' really is - who are we to say? They decide.
This is only a natural progression - it makes limbic sense that a generation of Boomer media decision-makers and talkers and writers would return, during 2007's Vietnam, to the self-destructive and debased logic learned from their parent's Vietnam: In order to save a vilage, you must burn it.
Well, it's working. We're in flames. Fake fighter-jock presidents make reporters squeal and everybody's on the make, so why bother? We're in flames, and firefighters are suspect. And largely, thanks to a criminally cynical and jaded media that seems to have learned a few other lessons in their formative years: if it feels good, do it. And never trust anybody over or under thirty.
I don't know about anyone else, but it's enough to turn one into an old-timey conservative. The kind who believed that publick shaming and corporal punishment had their positive uses.