Assessing poverty by education level and household income, poorer communities are less civically engaged and complain the most that their needs are not responded to.
Not too long ago, I overheard a pair of grocery store employees talking to each other. One said, ‘They [immigrants] get everything for free and they still steal.’ On another eavesdropping occasion, I heard a parent grumbling about being an American who has paid taxes since her first job as a teenager working at a fast food restaurant. Today, finding herself in need of some help due to a complicated illness of one of her children, government assistance agencies resist and deny her. The hoops, questions, documents, paperwork process, delay and redirection are exhausting. Meanwhile, it appears that migrants are getting food, healthcare, and housing funded in part by tax dollars extracted from her wages beginning in adolescence. What’s not to be disturbed about if you’re an everyday American citizen? Do you think they vote?
Speaking for myself, I vote and it nonetheless makes me want to gather stones, insults and my disgust and hurl them all at migrants, the unhoused, people who drop trash on the ground, behave selfishly by playing their music loud, children that misbehave and wreak havoc in the neighborhood, absentee parents, any behavior I deem as lacking good judgment or circumstances that burden a community’s resource supply. I want to fight because I can’t easily move and it frustrates me. I believe I could better feel compassion from a distance.
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