So Rush Limbaugh is pulling another stupid human trick, this time assaulting the very idea that schools might want to feed poor children. What I find revealing is his stated rationale for challenging the notion that it might be a good idea to give poor children food: “If you feed them, if you feed the children, three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer?” It’s as though he were describing baby black bears in Yosemite National Park who might not learn to forage properly if tourists keep giving away their pic-a-nic baskets.
The thing is . . . I have become more and more convinced that this attitude isn’t too far off from how the political and economic elite really do see the rest of us. I used to think they view the millions of Americans who are the 99% as akin to crops or livestock, something to be harvested or culled for money when the need arose. But I no longer believe that analogy holds. After all, ranchers actually do have to spend money and tend to their cattle, farmers actually do have to water and care for their crops. But the 1% and the public servants who toil on their behalf no longer bother to ensure we have minimal care.
Instead, I think it is more accurate to say that the 1% now conceive of the hundreds of millions of Americans who together make up the largest economy in the world as a kind of natural wildlife that should be left free to forage on its own, but which they are at perfect liberty to trap, skin, slaughter and eat as they please, their exploitation restrained only by the dimmest of understandings that enough of us must be allowed to survive so that our next generation can be trapped, skinned, slaughtered and eaten in turn.
And, indeed, it’s fairly easy to understand why they’d see us that way.
