Forum Post: Hard Times in Mean America

How did we come to this? How can an individual make up for the failure of the community, of the nation, to act in response to growing poverty, hunger, and homelessness? Our political leaders don’t want to talk about poverty. People in hard times aren’t sympathetic in America where success is said to signal moral character and fortitude and individuals are said to rise and fall in isolation. The great surprise of this Great Recession is how obstinately Americans hold onto our belief that hard times are just desserts for the people who fall into them.
The rungs of the class ladder turn out to be greased, but we watch neighbors, co-workers, and friends slipping down the ladder and think they must be doing something wrong. Senior citizens join the Tea Party and demand that our government ceases to care for people in hard times. For them the people collecting unemployment benefits are individuals who have done something wrong and now want a hand out. The Tea Partiers, of course, get to keep their Social Security and Medicare because they deem themselves deserving. Republicans, who in the words of Jillian Rayfield “hate the jobless for being jobless,” take principled stands to protect private jet tax loopholes for the wealthy who we now must to refer to in Newspeak as Job Creators. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/republicans-to-unemployed-why-wont-you-all-just-get-some-jobs-already.php Our failure to respond to the actual economic crisis facing actual living beings is so irrational that it begins to look simply mean-spirited. Perhaps meanness -- begrudging, stingy, limited in view, suspicious of others and protective of ourselves -- is our new national characteristic. I can see this even in myself. The same week that I saw the girl on the 215, a young man, thirty-years old in jeans and a baseball cap decorated with hip hop font, knocked on my door. He said he wanted to talk to me about Jesus, so I quickly dismissed him and closed and locked the door. A minute later he knocked again and explained that he wondered if he could use the faucet in the front yard to drink some water. He said that he had been walking in the heat all day and the Gatorade in his back pocket was warm. A half-formed joke about Jesus and doing for the least of these drifted in my mind. I really wanted to offer him a proper glass of water from my kitchen. But I didn’t. I said go ahead and use the faucet before closing and locking the door again. I still don’t know what I should have done. On one hand, it was unnerving that he was alone – don’t prostelyzers come in twos? On the other, for god’s sake, I could have brought him a drink outside. It strikes me that he never even asked for an actual glass of water, just permission to use the faucet. Like me, he understood that distrust was inherent to our interaction. After all, we are close enough in age to have both grown up with constant warnings about strangers and their desire to hurt you.
Perhaps we have lived with this message for so long we cannot see each other as anything other than strangers with poisoned apples. What happens to a nation when it becomes a collection of threatening strangers? My entire lifetime has been marked by this cultural spirit of meanness. As a child I learned to suspect neighbors of harboring desires to slip razor blades and poison in Halloween treats. One particularly histronic Halloween I suspected the neighbor who gave out stationary of lacing the envelope glue with poison. Even if your parents didn’t buy into the hysteria you could not escape the warning to be on guard against strangers as a child in the eighties: we were warned by teachers, news anchors, public service announcements, and each other. The threat was not confined to Halloween. We had to worry about strangers with candy, being snatched, rapists, and even, for a few insane years, day care workers involved in both Satanism and child pornography. The Soviets and the bomb still menaced from afar, but there was no sanctuary to be found domestically either.
It’s not a coincidence that this culture of meanness coincided with the ascendancy of the right in America. Meanness -- begrudging, stingy, limited in view, suspicious of others and protective of ourselves – is the prime motivator behind the desired elimination of the social safety net and “liberation” from taxes. Grant me liberty from participating within a community and give me the freedom to be an island amid a sea of threatening strangers. Amen!
The thing about meanness is that it ends up hurting the mean themselves in the end. You can always be sure that the mean little man in a Dickens novel will end up a victim of his own meanness in the final chapter of the novel. It begins to look like we too are victims of our own meanness. Perhaps the Tea Party, Citizens United, and a weak Democratic president are all we deserve for embracing the dystopic fairy tale of Reaganism for thirty years. How does a nation unlearn meanness? How does a community unshrivel its soul?