You Can’t Handle The Truth

There’s a meme making the rounds, comparing welfare recipients to animals.  I won’t give it airtime, here; you can google it easily enough.  The idea is to be all cutesy and tongue in cheek, like, the government says don’t feed the bears!  Which is great, until you stop to consider that you’re referring to the 90% of welfare recipients who are children.  And elderly, often veterans.  Yes, the same veterans you just posted a meme about respecting.  And working households.  And just plain other human beings, just like you.  Other human beings who deserve the same respect that you’d have accorded to yourself.  My (further) reaction to this meme, and others’ reaction to my reaction, is what I’m going to discuss.

I posted a response on my public page:

There’s a meme going around, comparing individuals who receive welfare to animals. I’d ask you to think long and hard before sharing it. First, there’s no moral high ground in engaging in this type of holier than thou, dehumanizing crud–regardless of the group it’s directed toward. Looking down on others doesn’t make you better than them; it makes you someone who’s comfortable living in their assumptions and, too, someone who’s desperate to make their own life situation seem more palatable by putting down others. But moreover, when you share things like this, you never know who’s reading–I mean, who’s really reading. All too often, we do judge people on the basis of our assumptions. There was a former Celtics player who lived in front of the law school I attended. People looked at him and they saw a lot of things, most of them not very good, but they didn’t see a world class athlete. They didn’t see an ex millionaire. And when people look at me now, with my nice house and my nice car and my nice whatever, they don’t see a kid for whom the occasional frozen dinner was an exotic treat. I grew up going to food pantries; I grew up being made fun of, because I was poor. I grew up on welfare. And when you make these kinds of jokes, thinking you’re in “safe” company because I, and others like me, don’t conform to your prejudices about “welfare queens,” you show me just how fake you are–and just how shallow that “Christian spirit” really runs.

I posted a similar response on my private page, but with the caveat that anyone who shares memes like this or agrees with them–or the sentiment in general–should take themselves off my page.  Because we are emphatically not friends.  “I’m not friends,” I wrote, “with people who engage in this holier than thou, dehumanizing crap to begin with–regardless of the group it’s directed toward–but I’m especially not friends with people who obviously look down on my origins this much.”  As no one immediately leapt to de-friend me, which I knew they wouldn’t, I added my own little tongue in cheek comment about how people were dick-less cowards who only had the “courage” to spew hate when they thought they were among friends.

Well.

You’d think I’d been attacking puppies with flamethrowers.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that would have generated less of a response.  I was “spewing hate.”  I was “to love others unconditionally, as the Savior, who taught us by His example.”  And “love and kindness is what it’s all about.”  Which…has anyone actually read their Bibles?  If Jesus taught us one thing, as His purported followers, it was that loving people means not enabling them.  Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan?  Jesus wasn’t going around high-fiving the (metaphorical) Levites of his day.  If it’s following the Savior’s example to shame children for receiving SNAP benefits, then, I’m sorry, there must be another “Savior” of which I’m not aware.

More people need to remember that Jesus was a dirty hippie who provided free food and universal healthcare.  He didn’t go around, making people feel better about their moral disabilities; he told them that if they didn’t do likewise, that if they didn’t extend charity to the least of their fellow human beings (start reading at Matt. 25:40), that they were going to Hell.  That they didn’t know Him.  That they were empty tombs (Matt. 23:27–28).  Gee, I guess He was “spewing hate” too.

Listen, if you choose to live your life in such a fashion that you–again, choose–to perceive any criticism as “spewing hate,” then you’re going to have a problem.  But there’s a bigger problem here, and that’s cowardice.  Moral cowardice, and the regular kind, too.  Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions.  If you’re brave enough to say something–whatever it is–then you should be brave enough to hear people’s responses.  Not everything everyone thinks, in response to your existence, is going to be good.  And, you know, that’s okay.  It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with you and nor does it mean that there’s anything wrong with the other guy.  It just means that people are different–and that’s okay.  The mistakes we make, in terms of the words we let slip from our lips, might not define our character; but our response to others’ responses does.

We can choose to learn.

Or we can choose to adopt the entitled mentality.

That it’s not “spewing hate” to attack people who are different than you, but it is for those people to say, “hey, that’s not okay” is the epitome of entitlement.  It’s basically promoting the idea–just like the meme is–that a certain group of people are somehow less.  That their voices matter less.  That they should be Christlike, not in the sense of Christ thrashing the money lenders out of the Temple but in the sense of being doormats.  Which, incidentally, Christ never was.

I tell my family, let people teach you who they are.  Everyone uses the same phrases: golden rule, honesty is the best policy, Christlike behavior.  They show you what those phrases mean to them, however, by their actions.  Because they might be the same words, used over and over, but they almost never mean the same thing.  Which, clearly, is a principle at work in this post.  I open my Bible and find a very different Jesus–and a very different instruction on ministering to the poor–than some other folks.  Which, incidentally, kind of makes me wonder if they’re reading their Bibles.  Too many of us, while professing to be Christians, choose to ignore what Christ would teach us.

I attend a non-denominational church now and one of the things I’m glad I’ve escaped is this notion of a prosperity gospel.  Which I always hated.  Mormon doctrine presents wealth as a byproduct of righteousness; if you don’t have it, then surely something must be wrong with you.  An aspect of my former religion that, ironically, I managed to be unaware of until shortly before I left–although I certainly felt its effects, and continue to do so now in the form of former friends woefully predicting my financial demise now that I’m an apostate.  Unfortunately, this fixation on wealth equaling righteousness has had the effect of making a lot of really good people really blind–people who, in my eyes, should know better.

I have the right to disengage from people who talk down about my origins, just like the people who’ve disengaged from me, because they think I’m a sinner, also have that right.  Freedom of choice should be a thing.  But freedom has, at the same time, never meant freedom from consequences.  The world might be unfair, but making a classist or a racist joke in front of the wrong audience and being robbed your chuckle isn’t among its greatest problems.