It's Not Easy Being Santa

[MAlibdem]

Edit: By Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated, Dec 27, 2004-Jan 3, 2005.

An interesting article from Sports Illustrated. And a sad one:

(snip)
This holiday season the morals of a lot of athletes are lower than flounder droppings. The other day I heard a worried announcer say, "What must kids think of the way we adults are behaving?" But you really can't ask kids because when a kid is asked a question by an adult, the only thing the kid thinks is, How huge are this man's nostrils?

Kids trust Santa, though. They'll tell Santa anything. So I set out to conduct the Santa Sports Survey. Disguised as Saint Nick, I would spend 90 minutes at each of three Boys & Girls Clubs in metro Denver. I loaded the trunk with toys and trinkets, borrowed a Santa suit from the Cherry Creek Mall and called Susen Mesco of Amerevents.com, which runs one of the best Santa Schools in the country.

...

I kept trying to hit them with survey questions like, "Do you view athletes as role models in this age of ...," and they kept hitting me with real life. "Santa, for Christmas could you make the bill collectors stop coming?" one boy said. "It makes my mom cry." A little girl said, "Santa, could you bring us a new house? The one we have now leaks all the time." Lots of kids wanted hats and shoes and coats. "I want clothes," said one boy. What kind? "The warm kind," he said. Another kid wanted to be an NBA star and make "a million dollars." "What would you spend it on?" I asked. "Doctors," she said, "for my cousin. She's four. She has cancer."
(/snip)

The whole article requires a subscription, but you get the jist.

This resonates. This is Democratic morality. Fixing this. That should be our goal.


(Whole article at http://premium.si.cnn.com/pr/subs/siexclusive/2004/writers/rick_reilly/12/20/reilly1227/ but requires a subscription)

[robbedvoter]

1. But democrats are for "the middle class". When I brought this up

I got responses about "working poor" "government programs" boot straps" "everyone thinks is middle class" and "don't make this into a rich vs poor thing". And this was on DU!
So, I don't know anymore what a "democratic mentality" means.
Maybe the poor don't need a Santa after all, but THEIR OWN PARTY

[MAlibdem]

2. Humanizing the issue is essential...

It's easy, though wrong, to dismiss the suffering of an adult as a failure on their part not to work hard or be intelligent. It is impossible to dismiss the suffering of a child as the fault of the parents. That's why children can get healthcare from the government much more readily than adults. Because we have this idea that we should take care of children as our own, but not take care of each other as our brothers and sisters. And that's wrong. And we can change that, easily.

Humans will usually point to dispositional factors, innate nature, in another's misfortune while pointing to situational factors in describing their own (thank you psych 1). Thus, we need to explain the situational factors that get people into poverty so that we can get people to understand and identify with them. John Edwards was doing this convincingly in the primaries when he spoke about two Americas. He used the example of a hungry little girl, and he promised her that "Hope is on the way." We MUST be that hope. We MUST champion the cause of those who are left behind.

We have to do this for two reasons. The first is clear: It is the right thing to do. The second is because, electorally, we need to expand and reinforce our base in a way that does not alienate others. This reinforces our black base, we expand in low income voters (where Republicans have been doing better b/c of BS moral values), and it's a fight that can and will resonate with the heart strings. We fight this battle, and we have the moral high ground. Doing things for the poor is right, it's popular, and it's not even that costly compared to many of the things we do.

[baba]

3. Back in the early years of charity

A couple of hundred years ago, there was the concept of "worthy vs. unworthy" poor. The "worthy poor" were children, or people who were poor through "no fault of their own" and these people deserved charity. The "unworthy poor"- pretty much everybody else! They didn't deserve charity, and if they did they would get minimum help. This standard still persists today.

[MAlibdem]

4. Well, we can work in this context

I am not condoning the concept of worthy poor/unworthy poor...but we have to start somewhere.

If we give opportunities to the "worthy poor" - children - this means that the number of "unworthy poor" - adults - goes down over time.