by Pa Rock
Tweetist
This summer I will have been on Twitter for ten years, during which time I have posted or "retweeted" nearly 30,000 pithy little messages. Twitter is an entertaining medium that can be quite addictive. Most people only "follow" (agree to receive tweets from) others whose views align closely with their own, thus it also serves as a loud echo chamber.
One Tweeter whom I have followed for the past several years is "Aunt Crabby," a supposedly elderly lady from the St. Augustine, Florida, area who has a raging hatred of Donald Trump - and a computer. She boasts that sending Trump packing is the last item on her bucket list. Aunt Crabby has over 220,000 followers, and her tweets often make it into national opinion columns.
Aunt Crabby, with her irreverent attitude and salty language is, according to her tweets, also politically active in her community and gets involved in door-to-door political canvassing. She is earnest in her endeavors to expose GOP hypocrisy and bring down Trump.
Today Aunt Crabby posted the following tweet (in two parts) on welfare in America, remarks which I felt went directly to the hypocrisy of politicians and others who rail about the unfairness of behaving charitably toward the poor. She said this - and she speaks for me and undoubtedly many others:
We all know that these types of corporate welfare and fraud are occurring on a grand scale. Yet, as angry Americans, we find it somehow easier and so very much satisfying to vent our outrage by demonizing the poor.
We suffer, and the only way we can bear that suffering is to know that others are even worse off than we are. It is also much easier to blame high taxes on things we can see, such as a poor person using a food benefits card at the local grocery, than on things we can't see like billions of dollars in foreign aid going to a despotic leader in some faraway land. We blame those who are at hand, the poor among us, and then we rig the system to make sure that their lot in life will never improve.
A truly Christian nation would be focused on improving the lives of its people who are in need - and not hellbent on keeping them down.
We used to b better than that.
Tweetist
This summer I will have been on Twitter for ten years, during which time I have posted or "retweeted" nearly 30,000 pithy little messages. Twitter is an entertaining medium that can be quite addictive. Most people only "follow" (agree to receive tweets from) others whose views align closely with their own, thus it also serves as a loud echo chamber.
One Tweeter whom I have followed for the past several years is "Aunt Crabby," a supposedly elderly lady from the St. Augustine, Florida, area who has a raging hatred of Donald Trump - and a computer. She boasts that sending Trump packing is the last item on her bucket list. Aunt Crabby has over 220,000 followers, and her tweets often make it into national opinion columns.
Aunt Crabby, with her irreverent attitude and salty language is, according to her tweets, also politically active in her community and gets involved in door-to-door political canvassing. She is earnest in her endeavors to expose GOP hypocrisy and bring down Trump.
Today Aunt Crabby posted the following tweet (in two parts) on welfare in America, remarks which I felt went directly to the hypocrisy of politicians and others who rail about the unfairness of behaving charitably toward the poor. She said this - and she speaks for me and undoubtedly many others:
"You want the government to 'stop giving poor people free stuff'? But you don't care about the $70 billion a year we spend on subsidizing Wall St. Banks, the $38 billion in subsidies given to Big Oil Companies, the $2.1 trillion that Fortune 500 corporations are stashing abroad to avoid paying US taxes, and the $153 billion a year we spend to subsidize McDonald's and Walmart's low-wage workers?
Stop being a hypocrite."
We all know that these types of corporate welfare and fraud are occurring on a grand scale. Yet, as angry Americans, we find it somehow easier and so very much satisfying to vent our outrage by demonizing the poor.
We suffer, and the only way we can bear that suffering is to know that others are even worse off than we are. It is also much easier to blame high taxes on things we can see, such as a poor person using a food benefits card at the local grocery, than on things we can't see like billions of dollars in foreign aid going to a despotic leader in some faraway land. We blame those who are at hand, the poor among us, and then we rig the system to make sure that their lot in life will never improve.
A truly Christian nation would be focused on improving the lives of its people who are in need - and not hellbent on keeping them down.
We used to b better than that.
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