papillon

But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”  

The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical. 

But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?

People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you. 

Contact Your Representative and Tell Them To Fight Against Trump’s Camps

Additionally, if you can see if you can donate money to these organizations

Lawyersforgoodgoverment.com

fairfightbondfund.org

lgbtqfund.org

communitybondproject.org

immigrantfamilies.org

The point is not that we should feel sorry for women with a personal chef and a house in the Hamptons. Rather, my goal is to illuminate who gets to be both wealthy and morally worthy in our society. In the modern-day US, our concept of meritocracy is inherently gendered. This means that women bear the brunt of negative judgments about wealth—and raises questions about what women “deserve,” and on what basis, that cut across social class.

…

Not bringing in money left some of these women feeling vulnerable. A parenting expert told me, of the wealthy stay-at-home moms she worked with, “They feel so guilty that they’re wasting their degrees… They feel so ‘less than.’”

Helen (a pseudonym, like all other names in this piece), who had been an investment banker and had left her career reluctantly, told me, “[I’m] well-educated. I had a career. You know, where is all that now?” She said she sometimes felt like she was “working for” her husband. She added, “There are power dynamics, where he’s the breadwinner now, and I’m really not. And yet, I do so many things for the family that you can’t put a number on it.” Her unpaid labor is hard to measure, and therefore hard to appreciate.

Bridget worked part-time, bringing in much less money than her husband did. She said he gave her “a hard time” about spending but felt free to buy what he wanted. She put this dilemma succinctly, saying, said, “I can’t make enough money to impact our life. And how am I ever going to make enough money to deserve something, if I don’t just say I worked for this and I made this money?’” By bringing in the money, men often get the power to decide how it is spent. Equally important, they also get the right to feel like they “deserve” what they have.

The other reason wealthy stay-at-home mothers are vilified is that they are imagined to be excessive and self-indulgent consumers, in a world where over-the-top consumption is often seen as a moral failing. Women, more associated with consumers in general, bear the brunt of this kind of judgment, especially when they are thought to be spending only on themselves.

…  

Stephanie prided herself on being an attentive mother, making Halloween costumes for her son and baking “beautifully decorated” cookies for his school. She also explained in detail the stresses of managing their home in Manhattan and their weekend home, saying, “I’m the one that deals with all of it.” But, she said, her husband “thinks that I’m, you know, eating bon bons all day. It’s hard.” He also hassled her about spending too much, though she protested that she bought clothes at Target and cut her own hair and nails, while he splurged on expensive meals for his friends.

When the roles were reversed, women did not exert the same judgment over their husbands’ spending. The women I interviewed who earned more than their husbands, or who brought the bulk of the money into the household through inheritance, described this state of affairs as threatening to their husbands. Rather than control their husbands’ expenditures, they went out of their way to make men feel like they were contributing too, by letting them control the family’s investments or by legally turning over some sum of money to them. So the power dynamic here is about masculinity—not just about who brings home more of the bacon.

I’m speaking from experience as someone who grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood where the domestic violence shelters were full of battered women every night, most of whom would go back to their rich husbands in the morning because they were scared what would happen to them and their kids if they left. These men had the best lawyers and could take everything in a divorce, including the kids (a doubly scary option for a mother if your husband is abusive).

by this logic, value is derived by how much labor is required to accomplish something, in this case the labor of learning the skill in addition to the labor of completing the task at hand. a doctor would earn a much higher wage because of the labor required to earn the necessary degrees to practice. okay.

but then if you ask a right winger why the price of a pair of glasses, a mattress, or even a bottle of water is so expensive, despite these things being cheap and easy to make, they’ll tell you that value is not determined by the labor that goes into it, but by need and demand.

Just in case anyone was wondering what this blog’s stance on abortion is.

I understand some people fundamentally disagree with abortion, that’s fine, don’t have one then. But it’s not your decision to decide for someone else.

Under the new Alabama anti abortion bill, kids this young will be forced to undergo pregnancies their bodies are too young to handle.

I think it is important for people to realize that the people this ban will effect are just that- children.

Therefore I’d like to propose a campaign where girls post pictures of themselves at ages 8 to 12 to show how they could have been effected by this ban.

I dont have a snappy hashtag yet for a campaign, but if you have any ideas, please add them.