Sad View of Ourselves
The other day I read an article about State Representative John LaBruzzo considering a bill to mandate drug testing for welfare recipients. He argues, according to the article, that taxpayers could save money by keeping drug users out of the system. Placed below the article were the usual comments by the community. Each and every article applauded the potential law, and it got me to thinking: how is it that every voice commenting on this article could end up sounding so similar? This question got me to think about another question: did it matter what color or what ethnicity these comments came from?
I came to the conclusion that it could, might even, be possible that some of the voices belonged to Latinos. I hope not, but even so, what I noticed is that at the heart of many of the comments that did not see a problem with the article was this idea that somehow each and every commentator believed he/ she was speaking about the same group of people.
Who are these welfare recipients? What do they look like? Are they all drug users? And even if they are drug users, don’t drug users need mental health and substance abuse help? And wouldn’t they need welfare benefits to access this help if their problem is so bad that they are destitute and without resources?
What I find problematic is this base assumption that we can lump the “others,” whomever they may be, into this strange category of humanity that is supposed to function according to our own limited way of looking at the world. If I haven’t lived the life of a drug addict, or studied the psychology behind abuse and addiction, how can I possibly say anything of value about that? I can’t. If I haven’t fallen into poverty and experienced the hardships of limited income and lack of food and resources, how can I recommend to a poor person that she/ he do as I do? I can’t.
Yet we, many of us, including myself at times, end up lumping people with different experiences, different lifestyles, different whatever into a simplistic understanding that enables us to quickly dismiss, denigrate or even blatantly attack them. For a heavily Christian country, I find this sort of rhetoric incredibly non-Christian. I am not trying to make a Christian case, but I am putting this question out there: can we really assume that because life has worked out a certain way in our own personal world that it has worked out the same way for another person? We cannot. Nor can we assume that if we ended up in the same shoes; if we found ourselves poor, hungry, or lost that we would not need the help. How does anyone know? We haven’t been there. We haven’t lived that.
So I think about how we see ourselves and I see a lack of community. I see isolated pockets of isolated communities that incorrectly assume that each individual can do for herself as well as the next person if only she/he applied herself. Really? According to the standards of this country, I am a successful Latino, and I can’t think for one minute how I could have made it as far a I have without help from other people. I don’t know a single successful person who has “made it” by going it alone-regardless of ethnicity, class, or language barriers or differences. The old adage about pulling oneself from one’s bootstraps was never a reality. The reality is that we need, depend on, and commune with each other. The sooner we realize this the sooner we can begin to look at more humanistic solutions to our social, economic and community problems. The sooner we can begin to speak this sort of language together, the sooner we can eliminate ridiculous propositions such as the one LaBruzzo recommends.
Tags: hispanic, latino, latinola, lucas diaz, puentes