the answer is empathy

Every day I see at least one post from an angry friend or relative that is barely scraping by ranting about the person they saw using foodstamps that had on "nicer jeans than me, fake fingernails, 5 kids, a coach bag, jewelry all over" or worse" and they paid for their beer and cigerettes then used food stamps for their frozen waffles and syrup".  The number of times this occurs at a convenience store--the equivalent of a bodega in a large urban area, just seems to make it worse, since the prices at those places are already inflated.

Those same outraged friends and relatives, when met with a person in the same store they are in, that is wearing designer everything, driving a ferrari, and paying with a credit card, they get talked about too, but it is as if the person that saw them has just spotted a celebrity and that greatness is going to rub off on them.

Apparently it is !GREAT! when the wealthy go slumming, but we want and need our poor people to know their place and stay in it.

Why the difference?  Is it like our avoidance of looking at the faces of those that are horribly disfigured  or is it a need to think that "if I'm doing as well as I am, what excuse do they have to not be doing as well.  Is that not a kind of self-pity;a personal belief that "I have it rough, so how dare they think they have it rougher?"

 Since I have rarely seen anyone (in the last 30 years--I think we might be better than we used to be) demand that the disfigured person be removed from their sight and then talked about like an affront to the sensibilities, as if they should know better than to want to be treated like a regular person,  I suspect it is more closely related to the second scenario.

Being poor in this country has been a sin for over a hundred years, maybe always.  If you feel that can't be true, Google Bondservant history.  The new history books in Texas have nothing on the old victorian genealogy rewriting.  My family has been here a long time, but until Ancestry.com, I had no idea the skeletons that could be covered up with an omission here and a brickwall there.

So, despite our "we love and fight for the underdogs" movie choices, in the real world, we back the conquering heroes not the vanquished.  We love the success stories of rags to riches (amazingly, most of those rags looked a lot like my regular clothes), but not the "rags to now my family is no longer starving" stories.  If little orphan Annie had spent her life in the foster system, no one would have cared a bit about her.

So can we develop empathy for those that are not doing as well as we are?  Maybe we just need to look at it a little differently. Or maybe we just need to look in the mirror  Who do we think we are?