Stoopid Stuff

In a World of Steel and Death and Men Who are Fighting to be Warm...

I don't want to live in Rick Santelli's world. It is a cold, dark place where you seek by any available means to accumulate wealth, and fight alone to hold on to it. A place where it is not only foolish to care about your fellow human beings, it may well be suicidal. A place where your only ethical signpost is rapacious greed, and your only salvation is your own savagery.

It is a relatively new, and completely artificial development that a society could even develop that would support this kind of hardcore, unrelenting selfishness. Human survival has always, from the very earliest times, been entirely dependent upon community. Community to create, to build, to care for the sick and injured, to educate the children and grow the food and yes, to help those in need. It is community that defines us, but note that it's requirement is SO necessary that it has evolved as a survival strategy for many other creatures as well.

It is not central to the important argument, but it is worth noting Santelli's foul hypocrisy. If his house caught on fire, would he fight the fire himself? I suspect he would call the fire department, part of his community's commitment to it's citizens, collectively supported by that community. If Santelli's neighbor's child gets into the cleaning products under the sink, is he outraged that the Poison Control hotline that saves that child's life was paid for by the taxes of citizens like him? Nope. His is a kind of ignorant, faux-populist selfishness that could only develop in a human being with a narrow, stunted worldview. Perhaps someone like a derivatives trader.

How dare he pass judgement on people in his own community in their time of need? How can he feel it is within his purview to judge them worthy of assistance, or just too stupid or venal to "deserve" help? He should seriously consider what he might think if he was judged in the same way. If a child falls out of a tree and breaks his arm, we do not refuse to care for that child because climbing the tree was stupid or irresponsible. It is bad enough that we have allowed our society to become divided between the haves and the have-nots. Are we now to further divide our communities between those deserving of community services and those somehow less so?

The PURPOSE of community, and the reason it has been so fabulously successful as a human survival strategy for eons, is that it provides safety in numbers. It allows the costs of distributing resources to be spread out, and allows it's people to live and prosper because nobody is on their own. Just as Rick Santelli is not on his own. He only needs to look beyond his fear and greed to see it...

posted by mikey @ 12:41 PM