You Know What They Say...

Let’s talk about pigeons.

Raise your hands if you have ever seen a pigeon.  One...two…three… wow, pretty much every one of you has seen a pigeon.  That’s good.

Now, show of hands again, how many of you have ever seen, with your own eyes, a baby pigeon?

None?  None of you have ever seen a baby pigeon?  You ornithologists in the back are excused, you don’t count.  I’m talking to the normal, everyday people here.  The people who live in an area infested with these grey sky rats.  You see them every single day, but you mean to tell me that you’ve never seen a baby pigeon?  No pigeon nests full of eggs?  No little pigeony playgrounds and daycare centers (I mean someone has to watch the little fledglings while their parents are being a nuisance all day, right?)

And yes, I know that this example is a bit cliche, and that there are plenty of individuals who have explained this phenomenon, I’m merely using it as an example to set up my discussion about welfare and racism, but I’m not there yet.

So no; people pretty much never see baby pigeons, for reasons that are completely logical.  The point here is that if I told you that there were no such thing as baby pigeons, you would call bullshit on me.  You know there have to be baby pigeons, and pigeon eggs, and pigeon nests, because that’s what other birds do. 

If I tried to convince you that pigeons instead weave cocoons for their eggs (primarily out of those little brown paper sleeves you use to hold Starbucks coffee cups, most likely,) and that adult pigeons emerge fully formed from these cocoons in the Spring, smelling of chai latte and hand sanitizer, you would most certainly call bullshit on that, even though you had no personal knowledge to contradict my explanation.   Because you are too smart to fall for such a patently ridiculous story.

Except statistics say you are not.

Think of all the little urban myths that still persist today, no matter how many times they are debunked.  Mothers still assert as immutable fact the idea that you must not go into the water right after eating, and that you shouldn’t sit too close to the TV for fear of damaging your eyes.  And, most frustratingly, every desk in every classroom on my school’s campus has been rendered a polychromatic moonscape of masticated gum wads because those same damn mothers misinformed their spawn that swallowing gum was bad for you (everyone knows it stays in your stomach for years,) and their  ignorant offspring, acting upon these idiotic edicts, have responded by depostiting their disgusting cud under their desks, since the only other option was to get up and spit it into the trash, a most unthinkable imposition.

When it comes right down to it, we believe what we hear, especially if it confirms our own preexisting beliefs and prejudices.  If you hear that someone you like did something really stupid, you might question the validity of the report.  But if it is someone you hate, even someone not known for making such boneheaded mistakes, you will eagerly accept the story.

This phenomenon is known as confirmation bias, and it is why so many people believe stories about Sarah Palin thinking planes could make wrong turns and end up in heaven, or that Obama is planning to take away everyone’s guns and give them as wedding gifts at gay marriages.

But it is also why a lot of old, ugly stereotypes still linger today. 

The other day, there was a discussion in the teacher lunchroom about welfare.  Now, we have a woman in our department who actually worked for the Department of Children & Families before becoming a teacher, and she often debunks a lot of misconceptions people bring up about how government assistance programs actually work.

But on this day, another coworker, whom I love and respect, was going on about the people who cheat the system, because of course she was.  I mean seriously, have you ever been a part of or overheard a discussion of welfare that didn’t have that as the main thrust?  No matter what aspects of the subject may have started the conversation, it will inevitably turn into a discussion of those who blatantly abuse the system.  Hell, you’re more likely to see a whole horde of baby pigeons than a discussion of welfare that doesn’t revolve around the abusers.

And that makes perfect sense, as that is the major bone of contention for most people.  And it is the one point upon which EVERYONE agrees.  Any person you talk to will agree that it is terrible that people abuse the system and mooch off of the taxpayers, charities, and private organizations that provide these services.

But have you seen them?

I mean have you yourself actually seen these people in person?  Have you personally watched them abuse the rules and scam the government for their own selfish gain?  I don’t mean you have a friend whose sister is a cashier, and she describes people using their WIC cards to buy cigarettes and booze, I mean individual, first hand experience.

Now, I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen, and I’m sure many of you may have been in line at the grocery store behind people on government assistance who were purchasing items you find offensively frivolous or fancy (ask Fox News about the indecently fresh food that some welfare recipients have the gall to purchase.)  My problem is not with the system, or its abuses, or even the righteous indignation towards such rampant malfeasance, it is with the assumptions.

Because my friend and fellow teacher (who is as kind-hearted and dedicated a educator you could wish your own child to have,) was expressing her ire at a report that her son (an upstanding member of the local constabulary,) had found online (the repository of all that is honest and forthright,) about shocking places where people had used their assistance cards to get cash.

Of course these were the usual claims and accusations, about strip clubs and Hawaiian resorts and so forth.  All carefully selected to rustle one’s jimmies and evoke the old familiar rage against a corrupt system and its flagrant abusers.  I personally am not familiar with this alleged report, having not bothered to research it as I felt it was not germane to the discussion at hand, and so neither support nor deny its supposed claims.

I did not, at that time, question the veracity of this report nor inquire as to the reliability of the source of this information, coming to me as it was by way of a friend, through her son, via the hallowed halls of the interwebz.  I simply let it go.

But the conversation turned, as they always do, towards the ever more egregious abuses of the system.  And inevitably, drawn ever downwards by righteous anger towards the miscreants who tarnish the entire program, past the women who wear their gold jewelry in the unemployment line, beyond the welfare queens driving their Cadillacs to pick up their checks, we find ourselves in the lowest circle, the frozen plains of the women who intentionally have more children so as to receive more government assistance.

This was too much for me.  I finally had to ask her the question I posed earlier in this post:

“How do you know this?”

She was taken aback by this, and reacted as if I had asked what language she was currently speaking.  “They do!” was the response.

Now I want you to seriously think about this for a second.  Imagine a person getting money from the government to take care of a child.  How much money would you have to receive before you thought ‘wow, I should totally go through another pregnancy and give birth to a child!  That would absolutely be a profitable venture for me at this time!’  And how much money would that have to be so that the cost of diapers, food, health care, and everything else would still leave enough profit to make it worthwhile?  I really can’t imagine what they receive being that much, can you? 

I’m not saying that there aren’t people that may have children (for all the usual reasons, good or bad,) without considering carefully if they can support those children without the need for government assistance, I simply mean the specific allegation that there are a significant number of women intentionally having babies because the Gummint has incentivized children.  I can’t really imagine that practice being epidemic, and I certainly don’t know welfare recipients pursuing that particular agenda myself.  So I put it to my friend:

“But how do you know?  Have you ever met anyone who does this?  Have you ever met a person who is in this situation?”

She had no answer to this, and took offense with me taking her to task about it.  She simply straightened her spine and asserted “I just know it happens.”

I let it go at this point.  I still respect my friend, but I can’t countenance the idea of simply accepting rumors and whispered hearsay.   Now, she could have whipped out her phone and found the data.  She does it all the time, looking up information to corroborate or debunk something that came up in our lunchtime conversations.  But in this case, she believed something because she believed it, and was uninterested in having this idea challenged, and extremely disinterested in researching the facts.

Her anger had become her dogma.

Now maybe I’m making a big deal out of this.  We all know there are people who scam welfare and other government assistance programs.  We all KNOW it.  We've always known it.  And surely we've all heard some statistics quoted somewhere that support that fact, even if we can’t remember the details, and can’t be bothered to look it up.  But we know it, don’t we?

But then again, we all knew that if you read in dim light it would permanently damage your eyesight, too.

But we are intelligent people; the kind of folks who confirm our facts, who trust and verify, who do not rush to judgments.  Why then do we simply accept this premise without question?  I've talked to many of my smart friends (I don’t make it a habit of befriending unintelligent people,) and none of them have ever done any serious research into the subject.  I mean they've all heard about these people, and many have read articles or Facebook posts complaining about the phenomenon, but how often do we actually examine the facts?

Why would so many people have such a powerful bias against those on government assistance that we are ready to believe nearly any negative story we hear about them?

My theory is it's because the people I’m asking are all middle class.

As hard working, tax-paying citizens, we resent anyone that we see as getting a handout.  I don’t even think it’s necessarily the fact that it is our tax dollars supporting them so much as the mere idea that while we are working hard for everything we have, someone else has it easier.  Screw those people!

Further evidence for my theory comes from talking to those same people about the other group we vilify: the wealthy.  Whereas the extremely poor are all lazy, conniving, shiftless moochers, suckling upon the public teat, the extremely wealthy are universally greedy, corrupt, malfeasant robber barons with their boots on the neck of the middle class.

See what I mean?  We resent the people who have more than we do just like we resent those who have less.  The common factor is the idea of someone being given what they have not earned.  We figure if we have to work hard, everyone else should too.  I’m not saying that it is conscious, or that it is fair or right, I’m just postulating a possible reason here.

So what’s my problem?  I mean no one can deny that there are, in fact those people who abuse the system.  And as I've already covered, anger at those people is both natural and reasonable.  So why is this an issue?

The reason of course, is that it is only one example of this behavior.  “People on welfare are lazy scammers,” isn't that far down the road from “gypsies are all thieves,” or “Irishmen are drunks,” “blacks are criminals,” “Asians suck at driving,” “Muslims are terrorists,” “Jews are cheats,” or “white men can’t jump.”

When you are willing to accept a generally held idea about a group of people without examining it, willing to go with what you have heard about that group over personal experience, or apply what you ‘know’ about someone you’ve just met, based on their classification, rather than starting at zero with each new person, you deny yourself a fair chance at accepting the world as it is, and deny that person their basic human individuality by reducing him or her to one of ‘them.’

And there will certainly be people in your life who will try to prove those stereotypes valid, no matter how you group people.  You will meet incompetent teachers, you will encounter untrustworthy mechanics, crooked lawyers, lazy cops, hypocritical Christians, slutty cheerleaders and dumb jocks.   And one day you might even get to meet some of those indolent frauds who rip off the welfare system and the taxpayers who support it.

But when you stop seeing those people as individual assholes and malcontents, and hold them up as emblematic of the group to which they belong, you begin to paint that entire group with the same brush, and that leads to bigotry, scapegoating and intolerance, and anyone who has studied history understands that is a dangerous path for a society to tread.

So the next time someone brings up a ‘them,’ be it an ethnic or religious group, a nationality or occupation, or yes, even people receiving government assistance, consider that there may be more to the situation than just what you have heard, or what you ‘know.’  There could be things going on in the situation that you don’t know because you can’t see them.

Kind of like baby pigeons.