November 16, 2022
With the election coming up (I'm writing this the Saturday before the 2022 midterms) I've been thinking about how my thoughts have changed over time.
Growing up I thought I was lower-middle class. In reality "middle-lower class" was probably closer. Dad worked and Mom stayed home with my sister and me, and we didn't have a ton of money as a result.
Now, this was Akron in the full swing of the rust-belt days, so there were a bunch of families in the same condition as us or worse. The scout troop I was in did its own fundraising beyond the standard popcorn sales so we could do monthly campouts for $5 per person. Summer camp was $100 or so, and the troop was able to at least partially subsidize the kids who were the worst off. If they wanted to go, we found a way.
And that never bothered me. We could put together the hundred bucks and some other people couldn't. And it's not like I hadn't been on the reduced-cost lunch plan a few years before that so sometimes needing help and sometimes giving help was just the way of the world.
Which made the big-L and later small-L libertarian turn I took in college all the more confusing, looking back. I knew the world was unfair from my own experience, why did I suddenly assume it had stopped being that way once I borrowed a shitton of money to go to college?
The reality of my after-college life smacked those thoughts back out of my head, helped along by the eight years of GWB's presidency. Watching, as an adult this time, as Reaganomics II made things worse for anybody who wasn't in the upper crust. It's stayed with me as I bought a house and paid off my student loans. As I became actually-middle-class.
I'm doing OK for myself now and have been for several years. It could be better, but that has as much to do with trying to spend Jacksonville wages on northern Virginia housing as anything else. And I think people on the bottom of the ladder should be helped. And I think that waiting for the people who can help to donate to charity is far less efficient than the government just taxing them.
I see the people who would benefit from "big government" programs vote against people who would implement or improve them just because someone else would benefit more. And it reminds me of the days in the scout troop. We were fine with helping other scouts and their families, but not the "welfare queens" through our taxes.
I didn't realize then that I was being played, like people don't realize they're being played now. Voting against their own self-interest so somebody else doesn't get "too much", or giving tax breaks to people who make more in a year than they'll see in their lives, in case they win the lottery someday. And I'm not good enough at words-ing to explain it to them.
So I'm left here hoping that in a few days the results come in and we've decided to help each other, instead of being at each other's throats while people who build rockets for funsies laugh their way to the bank.
