This Week Kicked My Ass

I have been super busy this week. Luckily I have a short reprieve for the Thanksgiving holiday but unluckily I have a few things due right after. So it'll be a nice time but not free of the hand of school work. That's ok, because school is my main priority right now.

In my gender studies class the other day we were having a discussion about welfare. I won't get into the meat of the subject but at some point I had to chime in and say that I felt we were, as a class, dehumanizing poor people and that everyone, no matter what their situation, has free will. Notice that I didn't say that people choose to be oppressed, raped, poor, etc. But next thing you know, that's the general point of view on my comment. To be fair, I think a lot of people agreed with me, but there was a lot of opposition to what I said. I didn't think I said anything controversial in asserting everyone's common humanity, but I guess I did. It exposed something that I've always found about extremists on either end of the spectrum (for these purposes the spectrum is a single line) who are so driven by ideology that they fail to examine reality. When I said that poor minorities have choice, I certainly didn't mean that they choose to be victimized by our society. I meant that within the circumstances that are beyond their control, they still have choices. That's it. Suddenly I'm a sexist racist. I actually believe that welfare for single mothers should be liberalized and that the 1996 welfare reform law was regressive, but to some I'm no better than people who decry "welfare queens" and think that welfare should be eliminated. I realized something though, I also have free will, and I refuse to debate with people who will not examine the ideas they hold. And I really refuse to debate people who dehumanize the people they supposedly wish to help. I'm thinking of one person in particular. You probably don't know her. She's in my class. I don't know her either, but she's an ideologue. To the majority of the class's credit though, they understood what I was saying.

Ideas are important, but when they cross the line to become unchangeable facts, that is what is dangerous to the world. As long as there is a dialog with a recognition that we are all people things are generally ok. Once we stop thinking of each other as people but mere support for ideas, that is when bad things happen. Do-gooders who assume some sort of superiority over the people they are trying to help make me angry.