The Washington Post editorial board published an embarrassing piece attacking New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani for wanting to make city buses free.
The piece is snarky and lame, but one section stands out as so anti-social as to merit a response.
After a forgettable section concern trolling about “Who’s going to pay for it?”, WaPost writes a very disturbing phrase you’d expect to see on Fox News. WaPost says making buses free is bad because:
”Vagrants and drug addicts would camp out all day on New York’s buses, especially in the winter.”
God forbid people who the WaPost views as subhuman use a public service.
To the folks at WaPost, the sight or smell of the unwashed masses and the incredible anxiety it causes to rich people when they are forced to interact with them is more of a problem than the suffering of those “vagrants and drug addicts”.
Yes, there are vagrants and drug addicts. They’re still people. Aren’t we supposed to help them?
But of course, WaPost doesn’t want to pay taxes to help these “vagrants and addicts”. They just want the suffering to be out of sight and out of mind.
As I understand it, things like busing are public goods. We all pitch in so that we can ALL enjoy something nice that we ourselves can’t do. It’s a sign of a healthy society where everyone looks after one another.
WaPost can call that socialism. I call it being a good human being.
I am not going to normalize hatred for the poor, including from a so-called “liberal paper”. The poor are my neighbor as much as anyone else.
This anti-poor attitude is just another way the rich turn one person against another.
