sometimes they just don't get it

[realthog]

Make no mistake, I'm a great fan of the rationalist organization the Center for Inquiry (CFI), and I think the work they do pushing back against the forces of ignorance and superstition -- and outing the crooks who take advantage of other people's ignorance and superstition -- is excellent.

But every now and then, almost reassuringly, the CFI does something so blitheringly stupid as to defy credence. A few months ago they issued a -- hastily retracted and revised -- positional statement opposing the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (you know, the one that isn't a mosque and isn't at Ground Zero). And now they've sent out a fundraising appeal that you can tell from its opening few lines just isn't going to raise that many funds from the rank-and-file CFI supporters like me.

A Special Message from Eddie Tabash
CFI Board Member, Speaker, Debater, and Chair of CFI Los Angeles

Like most Americans, I have been experiencing difficult economic times in this most challenging year. Nonetheless, I have personally donated a total of $100,000 to CFI during 2010.

That's where I stopped reading, and I suspect it's where most other recipients will have stopped reading likewise.

Anyone who has $100,000's worth of spare cash lying around that they can give to the CFI -- or any other charity -- is not "experiencing difficult economic times". "Experiencing difficult economic times" is what people whose total annual earnings are less than half that $100,000 -- sometimes 'way less -- are doing.

Comments

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I know this response is kind of facetious, but I hear this sentiment voiced fairly frequently, and as a person who has a foot in both worlds -- I've never yet made more than minimum wage (I'm shooting for a job in the low 30s now, fingers crossed!) and most of my friends are educators, social workers and other generally underpaid folk, but I also have successful lawyers and businessmen in the family making at least in the $100ks -- while there's no question even from the wealthier ones that there's ridiculous iniquity on the payscale, neither did they get to where they are now by taking holidays and buying yachts. They get there by working hard for 4500 hours or so a year. (And, yes, they are aware that there are many more people working just as long and just as hard and barely scraping by.)

Of course, there's rich and then there's rich, and maybe Mr. Tabash is one of those yachts-and-holidays lawyers, or maybe $100k required some deep digging into his bank accounts (or both!) -- I don't know anything about him, really -- but that people are making lots of money doesn't necessitate that they're at leisure.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Nathan, you have a point, but I don't think it's the full point. I've talked a little more on this in my response to La Marquise (above).

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree with you, and I wasn't trying to defend Tabash or his apparent conception of what it must mean to tighten one's belt. I was just reacting against what is an increasingly common misconception, at least among people I know and talk to, that the rich comprise a monolithic bloc of society. There are the silver spoon types, and there are the sociopathic social climbers, but there are also a lot (even if the percentage is diminishing as income disparity between the rich and poor widens and social mobility becomes more difficult) of rich who didn't start there, who work hard to be there, and who pay their taxes and give back to their communities rather than just buying toys or hoarding the wealth to pass on to their children or whatever. Over the last several years there's been a class warfare social narrative emerging in this country, and that's more than justified given the institutionalized iniquities and the increasing visibility of the abuses of parts of the financial sector. But, and maybe I'm just sensitive to it because of my background, there's this idea that the rich, however rich is defined for the purposes of any given conversation -- more than 100k per year, or 200k, or millionaires -- are automatically the enemy, and I don't find that to be the case.

It's similar to another narrative with which I'm very familiar, albeit from a (mostly) different set of people: that social protections and welfare programs only enable those lazy poor people to live off the rich. Are there people milking the system? Without a doubt. But they are not representative of the people who use the system. The poor are not a monolithic bloc. They are poor for all kinds of reasons and with all kinds of backgrounds. Many are born to poverty, and many are not but manage to achieve it during their lifetime.

I think part of the problem with discussing the rich is that the way rich is popularly defined includes a range from the obscenely rich top 1% who control more than a third of the wealth, down through the less obscenely wealthy 10% who control about 10% of the wealth, which would be about right if the other 90% were distributed roughly fairly, which it's obviously nowhere close to being. So the definition of rich covers a large range of people, while the idea of rich conjures images of yachts and leisure and expensive preparatory schools and silver spoons.

Sorry for the lengthy reply. I'm too tired to go back and chop it down right now.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Actually, I do know very much what you mean -- and you're perfectly right. But the kind of disconnect Tabash exemplifies seems to be becoming increasingly commonplace. The worst part of it is, most of our elected representatives are among those who've become completely oblivious to what life is like for the rest of us; to take a single example, just recently we saw rich and bloated GOPers, all with free medical insurance courtesy the taxpayer, resisting like hell the notion of extending unemployment benefits. They have quite clearly clean forgotten what life in the real world is like. (Or they're unadulterated shits. Or both.)