"Feel-Good" News Story or Poverty Propaganda?

[Ocelot II]

Viral news stories of individual pluck and charity only underscore how cruel our society is.

A staple of the feel-good news cycle—along with pieces about skateboarding dogs and friendships spawned by misdialed texts—is the story of human suffering overcome through community, charity, and old-fashioned pluck. There is the 14-year-old who spent his summer vacation selling homemade popsicles to help his mother pay for food, rent, and a motorized wheelchair. In Utah, a couple crowdfunded $20,000 for their Papa John’s delivery guy, an 89-year-old retiree who returned to working 30 hours a week delivering pizzas because his monthly Social Security checks don’t cut it.

Before shuttering his office and retiring, an Arkansas oncologist wrote off the medical debts of some 200 cancer patients, which totaled nearly $650,000. And a group of FedEx employees raised the money to buy a car for their 60-year-old coworker, who had been walking 24 miles round-trip to and from work each day because she couldn’t afford to fix her own broken-down vehicle.

These stories, at least as written, are supposed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Their purblind focus on the indomitable! human! spirit! suggests we should be moved and inspired by the up-with-people sense of community, the charitable generosity, and the hardscrabble uplift they describe—which, of course, is not to knock community, charity, or uplift. The problem, as even a cursory read between the lines of such stirring storytelling makes clear, is that these news items are just masquerading as life-affirming narratives. In reality, they unintentionally highlight the casual cruelty, exploitation, injustice, and multisystem dysfunction we’ve been socialized to accept in every aspect of our American lives. Only in a society inured to the heartbreaking inhumanity of capitalist culture could they be passed off as heartwarming.

The rest at https://www.thenation.com/article/society/safety-net-democrats/

[rickyhall]

1. Repugs & rich bastards should be forced to read such stories every fucking day and take a quiz.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[KPN]

3. Have felt that way about these last few minutes of the evening news now

for decades. The author is spot on. Disheartening that the media openly manipulates public acceptance of the relatively dismal conditions so many face in their daily life because of unbridled capitalism and “the best government money can buy.”