This is the thing you need to understand about the people who leave comments on the articles at JournalNow.com. They’re not representative of the Journal’s readers, or of the population of Winston-Salem (thank goodness!) – they’re just the people with the free time during the day to leave misspelled and uninformed comments shot with a nasty streak. So I keep telling myself, anyway.
As luck would have it, there are a couple of Journal stories that I’ve happened to follow over the last week or so, and it seems like all of them attracted the ignorati set. First there was a profile of my fellow Young Dem Ryan Eller, the minister who’s just been hired as executive director of the grassroots group CHANGE. Oops! “Change” and “community organization” are both terms that, for the mind-hobbits who patrol the Journal site, evoke the dreaded Barack Obama and the specter of “libruls”! Oh noes! CHANGE must be evil, Ryan is obviously a communist and libruls want big government who will steel yur babbez from the woom………..Sorry, I think I got hypnotized there for a moment.
Then today there’s an article about the city council and Mayor Joines meeting with our state delegation about a legislative “wish list” for the year, which included making it easier for the city to buy and rehabilitate abandoned properties, which it could then re-sell to low-and-moderate income families. To re-cap: the city wants to be able to take houses that have been vacant for two years (currently either crackhouses, squatters’ dens or fire traps), make them livable again and sell them. The city gets taxable property back on the books. The neighborhood gets a permanent resident with an incentive to improve the property (because that person now owns it). The resident gets a home, which means equity, “good” debt and all those other economic-engine things.
Without such a program, this is what we have: abandoned property stays abandoned, because it’s too risky for an individual investor to go in and buy it up. The types of areas where this would be in effect aren’t the kind of place where there’s only one beat-up house. You’re talking about a mix of rental properties in various states of quality, long-term owners stressing over their property values and the aforementioned crackhouse/rat hotels. The neighborhood would continue to slide downhill. The city may not be fabulously wealthy, but it has the leverage to fix up at least some of these properties, and even to subsidize the sale prices if necessary (though I haven’t heard that suggested at this point). Who was it that said that homeownership was good for society? Oh, yeah…President Bush.
Nope. It’s socialist. Spending any public money on anything is socialist. Acknowledging that my actions might affect you, and yours me, is socialist. Admitting that I don’t live all by myself on a private island built from volcanic ash that I farted out of my own ass ‘cause I don’t need a handout from Mother Nature – socialist. When did a 19th-century economic theory become right-wing code for “Somebody, somewhere, is getting something that it wasn’t my idea to give them and I DON’T LIKE IT!”?
This paranoid victim-fetishism among a certain class of conservative non-thinkers doesn’t surprise me when it’s on the JournalNow comments section. But when it comes from people who should know better – like anyone who’s enough of an “expert” to make it onto a TV news show – it pisses me off.
For instance, Ann Coulter has a new book out. I could tell because of the recent uptick in news stories with headlines like “Ann Coulter says (fill in the blank) are (fill in the blank).” Anyway, the woman who whines that she’s being attacked every time someone asks her to defend one of her arguments has written an entire book about the liberal culture of victimization. A few things: first of all, I think that Coulter’s funny as hell when she’s being funny. When she tries to pretend to be a serious authority on social research (yet still hiding behind the “I’m just a comedian” defense), she gets on my nerves.
And there are certainly people involved in left-wing causes who refuse to take responsibility for anything in their lives – as someone who’s actually involved in those causes, I encounter them frequently. But this is where I leave off – the implication that not a single conservative ever indulges in the poor-pitiful-me routine, and the conflating of an explanation with an excuse, of compassion with moral weakness. Saying that a child in an inner-city school with 40 kids to a class whose mom works three jobs is not going to have the same opportunities that I had growing up isn’t victim-mongering – it’s fact.
Ann Coulter bugs me because she’s intelligent enough to know the difference between saying that 70% of imprisoned criminals had single mothers and saying that 70% of children raised by single mothers will become prisoners, but she won’t share that difference with her readers. She’s probably also smart enough to understand the difference between “70% of murders/rapists/robbers, etc.” and “70% of the people actually arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for murder, rape, robbery, etc.” – but acknowledging that difference might mean admitting that there are inequities in the system, and we can’t have that. (Right now I’m remembering all the times growing up when I was told that I was an idealist, and that I needed to be more realistc…..Yeah.)
Too many conservatives in this country have turned away from serious thinkers and toward pundits who twist facts and history to spew a self-serving narrative that makes them feel better by dividing “us” from “them.” For many years, I was frustrated by the number of allegedly progressive politicians who clung to outmoded liberal dogma. Progressives won the last election because we were able to start moving away from many of those ideas. If conservatives want to stay relevant in American policy, they need to do the same. Let go of the resentment and let’s find ways to advance our entire society, not just pieces of it.
(Unless you actually do live on a private island built from volcanic ash farted from your own ass. In which case, can Ann Coulter come live with you?)
UPDATE: Just in case you thought I was being too hard on the humble JournalNow posters, check out a comment left last night: " If they just keep fixing low income housing for the blacks and hispanics the cycle will keep going, 10 years from now the will be talking about redoing the houses again. " Ummmmmmm?????
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