It's one thing to get upset when a stranger or someone I barely know posts a stupid and false copy-and-paste Facebook status about welfare benefits and drug testing (reproduced below). But when my own family does it and then starts spouting Regan era, Fox News talking point bullshit defending it, I get pissed, but it also makes me sad. And any attempt I make to defend myself on Facebook just gets me attacked by people I don't know (friends of family members) and I really don't care to defend my position against people I don't know and who, frankly, seem pretty uninformed and simpleminded.
Thank you FLORIDA and KENTUCKY!! Florida and Kentucky are the first states that require drug testing when applying for welfare, effective July 1st. Some people are crying this is "unconstitutional"... How is this unconstitutional? It's OK to drug test people who work for their money, but not those who don't? Re-post this if you'd like to see this done in all 50 states !!!
So I left it alone. But it just kept gnawing at me. So I was going to lay out my position here, to at least get it off my chest. But then I realized I don't really have to do that, it's been done, and is documented better than I would have been able to do. I found this article which does a wonderful job of documenting my points, thank you ACLU. I kept finding myself paraphrasing from it so I thought I would just link to it move on to what pisses me off that isn't addressed in the article. (Plus it's nice to get back to the cathartic side of blogging, not just posting pictures of places I go, like I have been lately.)
Drug testing as a requirement for welfare benefits is not just unethical, it is unconstitutional. And the ACLU article documents this very well. But the Facebook post pisses me off for more reasons than that. First and foremost is that people will copy and paste anything that uses capitol letters and exclamation points and says the words, "repost if you agree" at the end of it. This leads to a lot of people posting things that are stupid and that, if they actually thought about it, they wouldn't agree to put on their wall. And not just this one about welfare, there are dozens of them. It's the new, ridiculous email forward, the kind of thing Snopes was invented for. So many of these copy-and-paste statuses are false, four words typed into Snopes proved this one false in less than 10 seconds.
Another thing that annoys me about this post in particular is the ludicrous idea that the majority of people on welfare either abuse drugs or are abusing the system. It's not in the post itself, but in every discussion I've participated in, this is the first thing brought up. The term "welfare queens"was a Regan catchphrase, used to refer to women who committed welfare fraud. While the term isn't used very often these days, the Fox News wackjobs still cling to the idea that every single person who receives welfare benefits is a drug-abusing, lazy ass who does nothing but take advantage of hard-working Americans. And since everything that Glenn Beck says is the perfect, unadulterated truth, that must be the case. Never mind the studies that say otherwise, never mind common sense. "Poor people are bad and they're taking MY hard-earned money." This bullshit wasn't true when Regan was saying it in the '80s and it isn't true now, but because it plays into the "me, me, me" attitude, people are willing to buy into it without actually using their brains. That isn't to say that welfare fraud isn't a problem, it does happen, but not nearly to the extent that the people who post this stuff on Facebook seem to think.
A stereotype is, according to Merriam-Webster, "something conforming to a fixed or general pattern; especially : a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment." The reason I hate this post so much is that it perpetuates the stereotype. It takes something complex — people who receive financial benefits from the government for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to; a poor economy, mental/physical disability or a job that doesn't pay well enough) — and oversimplifies it into "people who are poor don't deserve a handout because they'll just use it on drugs." It is a prejudiced attitude and it is an uncritical judgment.
This type of thinking, or non-thinking, in stereotypes and talking points is all too common right now. It is true in the email forwards and the copy-and-paste statuses. It makes people feel like they are informed on the issues and taking a stand in politics. But if you are just repeating what other people are saying, if you aren't actually researching the issues, how can you consider yourself involved? Maybe the people who forward or post are informed, but then why are they perpetuating false information? It is my opinion that if you aren't going to take the time to inform yourself about an issue, you shouldn't put your opinion of it out into the world, because you just come off sounding ignorant. (And by that I mean the dictionary definition of ignorant and the Utah definition of "ignernt.")
A stereotype is, according to Merriam-Webster, "something conforming to a fixed or general pattern; especially : a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment." The reason I hate this post so much is that it perpetuates the stereotype. It takes something complex — people who receive financial benefits from the government for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to; a poor economy, mental/physical disability or a job that doesn't pay well enough) — and oversimplifies it into "people who are poor don't deserve a handout because they'll just use it on drugs." It is a prejudiced attitude and it is an uncritical judgment.
This type of thinking, or non-thinking, in stereotypes and talking points is all too common right now. It is true in the email forwards and the copy-and-paste statuses. It makes people feel like they are informed on the issues and taking a stand in politics. But if you are just repeating what other people are saying, if you aren't actually researching the issues, how can you consider yourself involved? Maybe the people who forward or post are informed, but then why are they perpetuating false information? It is my opinion that if you aren't going to take the time to inform yourself about an issue, you shouldn't put your opinion of it out into the world, because you just come off sounding ignorant. (And by that I mean the dictionary definition of ignorant and the Utah definition of "ignernt.")
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