Shadow Idol: On the matter of vertebra

"Nobody can ride your back if your back's not bent" - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent" - Eleanor Roosevelt

Bullpucky. Horseshit. Elephant dung. Buffalo chips. Coprolite.

No detriment to the quoted, but those kinds of phrases get used with the not-very-helpful idea that attitude is the sole determinant as to whether anything that happens to you is good or bad. If you are perpetually perky and optimistic, then nothing affects you and you do well. Don't lose hope, and everything will be okay.

History offers us many an example of sequences where people are made to feel inferior or to have someone riding their back. They usually involve physical violence, or any situation where there's a micromanager who insists that the work must be done their way and no other. The power of positive thinking isn't going to do a whole lot to fix either situation, or at least won't do as much as taking action to try and remedy the situation will, regardless of the attitude once takes to the situation.

Not to mention, that kind of insistence that attitude is important is wielded by the privileged to explain that the underprivileged aren't deserving enough for them to help them. There are probably enough resources sitting idle in the possession of Willard "Mitt" Romney or Barack Obama that if one of them really decided they were going to exercise Christian charity as described in the Foundational Writings, they would be able to affect millions of lives for the better without sending their personal fortunes all that much.

Christianity has anticipated this, though - if we just waited for the rich to improve our lives, or subscribed to the idea that rich people getting richer makes all of our lives better, well, we'd be waiting a very long time. (And The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton would be justifiably pissed off at us for not following the commandments. Which he may yet be.) So Christianity tells stories of regular people doing charitable things, like a member of the untouchable caste helping a traveler when the higher castes do nothing. A member of the poor donating when doing so hurts them is ascribed more virtue than the rich donating from their excesses. The earthly avatar of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton is regularly seen eating, drinking, sermonizing, healing, and blessing the people of the lower and untouchable castes. It's a motivation for those who barely have enough to take care of each other, because they're likely the only ones that will. Republican Jesus absolves the rich of their responsibilities to advance the welfare of their fellows (those responsibilities laid out by numerous prophets and The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton Himself), by telling its adherents that speaking the magic formula at the appropriate time and having belief is sufficient to be rewarded in the afterlife.

However, heavenly rewards do not mitigate nor lessen earthly burdens. And our earthly institutions are also doing a damn fine job of making people feel inferior or riding their back, regardless of attitude, in the way they conduct their practices. Republicans and conservatives often talk about "dependency", the idea that if the government offers services or assistance to citizens, those citizens will come to depend on the government for those services and will actively work against improving their situation if it means the loss of benefits. That situation, which does exist, by the way - it's the gap between the Federal Poverty Level and the amount of money needed to be self-sufficient (last I checked, it was about 3x to 4x FPL) - could be remedied fairly easily by offering the service to everyone. Health care, income assistance, all of it, and then charge appropriately to fund so that those who have excess can contribute from that and those who need receive the help they require. (For those worried about such programs acting political benefit to their opponents: it only does so if they do it first. For those with more ideological objections, read on...)

Some of the objections to "dependence", though, stem from the idea that someone should be able to make it on their own with their minimum wage job(s), even though said life will not be any sort of glamorous or easy. There's also a sometimes-unstated assumption that everyone has a robust social network (more often than not, this assumed social network is a Christian church congregation of one's particular denomination) that will step in and help someone on hard times. Again, those who barely have enough are expected to take care of those who do not. Heaven forefend that government require people to take care of each other through taxation and redistribution. To those people, a small quote will hopefully suffice:

You may plant your land for six years and gather its crops. But during the seventh year, you must leave it alone and withdraw from it. The needy among you will then be able to eat just as you do, and whatever is left over can be eaten by wild animals. This also applies to your vineyard and your olive grove. (Exodus 23:10-11)

Or perhaps this:

At the end of every seven years, you shall celebrate the remission year. The idea of the remission year is that every creditor shall remit any debt owed by his neighbor and brother when God's remission year comes around. You may collect from the alien, but if you have any claim against your brother for a debt, you must relinquish it...." (Deuteronomy 15:1-6)

Of course, that last quote does give an out, assuming that the person who collects on debts considers the person with the debt to be foreign to their nation/tribe. Which...happens a lot, actually, and leads into the other main reason conservatives object to government assistance programs - they believe that people using those programs are scammers, frauds, and persons gaming a system rather than honest people with difficulty because of their life situation. Welfare queens with Cadillac cars, in the Reagan era, promiscuous women having irresponsible sex in the Limbaugh era, and so forth. (We suspect that if someone were looking for frauds, they'd do better examining how corporations legally use the tax code to ensure they pay zero or less net taxes.) If poor people, minorities, and women using government assistance are always suspect, then the proper response is to "encourage" them to leave the government programs, using methods like forcing welfare recipients to take invasive drug tests (because, despite studies that show welfare recipients aren't spending their limited resources on drugs they can't afford and are the least likely of any population group to be using drugs, "everyone knows" drug users love welfare because it's free money for drugs), requiring family planning and health clinics to have admitting privileges to a local hospital (because despite a rock-solid record of very few fatalities when done under medical supervision, and more likely trauma coming from protests and harassment outside a clinic than inside, "everyone knows" that abortion is a highly dangerous procedure that could cause permanent damage to a woman physically and mentally scar her forever), or by refusing to participate in expansions of health coverage and the setting up of competitive markets for persons to buy suitable health care plans on (because despite their professed and unwavering fealty to The Market (All Praise To Its Name) and desire for everyone to participate in the insurance market, a solution that potentially works would give political capital to the opposition, which cannot happen, even if it might prevent the closing of facilities going bankrupt from providing uncompensated emergency care). All in the name of...Republican Jesus, perhaps. Or to ensure that only the "worthy" are granted respite from their toils.

Sure, you could argue that all of this can and should be borne cheerfully, giving one's suffering as a sacrifice to the deity of choice, but see above about privileged people being monsters to the underprivileged. And there's really only so much weight that you can pile on someone's shoulders, so much abuse and harassment they can take before someone cries out for relief, whether it's the person being attacked or the onlooker whose conscience has finally been moved by the display in front of them that they shout "No more!"

Or they collapse under its weight and it crushes them, sometimes slowly, sometimes not.

After all, at some point, something's gotta give.