Throughout our history, "othering", the classification of groups of people as undesirable or inferior has always permeated American life. Starting with America's "original sin", forced importation of black slaves, each new wave of immigration has been greeted with discrimination, hate and at times violence. Usually, the hated religious or ethnic group accused of stealing our jobs, our lifestyle, or our place in the class hierarchy, gets assimilated into society over the course of a couple generations. But another group is soon found as the target for the vitriol. I am sad to report that when it comes to motivating people to action, hate is stronger than love, fear is stronger than hope.
Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Asians,, Latinos, LGBT, Muslims - and women.
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| Swede Hollow |
In Minnesota, even the Swedes were not immune. Swedish immigrants to Mpls/St. Paul were directed to "Swede Hollow", a ravine along Phalen Creek where flimsy shanties in unsanitary conditions provided inadequate shelter for the newly arrived, surviving on sub-subsistence jobs in the lumber or brewery industries.
However, a persistent target for scorn has been a group only tangentially associated with ethnicity, the poor, This is something not true in most of the developed world. This in spite of, according Rick Warren, a well-known pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life, two thousand verses in Scripture dealing with our responsibilities to the the poor.
e.g. Proverbs 19:7 “Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done.”
The most recent data (2024) from the US Census Bureau shows that the national poverty rate is 11.5%. To put that into perspective, that's 36.8 million people living in poverty in America. The U.S. allocates a smaller proportion of its GDP to social welfare programs than virtually any other industrialized country. For context, In 2023, the federal poverty level the poverty guideline sets $15,060 for an individual and $31,200 per year for a family of 4. Think about that and the "living without" it implies. Home - unaffordable. Car - unaffordable. Health care - unaffordable. ....
Sadly, we tend to see the poor as undesirable, inadequate and unworthy. We offer them neither respect or empathy. Compassion in short supply. This is strange, since the majority of those in poverty are employed and have a high school education. And the disdain is not because the poor as a group threatens the middle and upper class lives. There is rarely interaction between the haves and have nots. And the gap has widened exponentially (during the pandemic, the world's billionaires increased their fortunes by more than $5.5 trillion - with a "T")
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Amish built cabins
for hurricane victims |
We as a nation do not seem to have the will required take to overcome the indifference to the plight of the poor? Why cannot we figure out how to make use of the 1/3 of our foodstuffs that goes to landfill? Why haven't small, cheap modular homes been developed that improve on a tent? Why is the federal mandated minimum wage $7.75? Why is mental health care so difficult to provide? Why are medications so unaffordable? Why is the primary source of health care for the poor the ER? Why do we not object to SNAP cuts? Why ... endless why's.
And a final topic. I cannot exit without citing history's most extreme example of "othering". It produced the holocaust, a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews - and millions of other innocents before and during WWII. I have just completed the reading of Richard Evan's 3 volume history of The Third Reich (The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War), all 2600 soul crushing pages of the horror the Nazis brought forth on the world between 1933 and 1945.
The final volume concludes with this warning ..
"The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, in all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate consequences of racism, militarism and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations which we are confronted. " Richard J. Evans
Copyright © 2024 Dave Hoplin
