America’s never-ending war on poor people: Why “The Briefcase” is just the latest assault

If you want to have an idea of ​​what the famous quotation of “poverty is the worst type of violence” of the Mahatma Gandhi means for the United States today, there are two stories from last week that you should read. One is Jonathan Cohn, journalist Ace Health Care of the Huffington Post. The other is from Margaret Lyons, a perceptive television critic of Vulture. Together, these two pieces offer a decent sketch of the way in which the American economy and its culture work together to ensure that the poor feel tirelessly.

Let’s start with Cohn’s play, which examines a new study by the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The study is based on five years of results of a person in person led by the National Health Entry Survey and, as Cohn writes, he “demonstrates, in vivid terms, something that public health experts have known for some time”. Note that the more poor you are, the more likely you suffer from what the field of public health calls “serious psychological distress” – something of a term of capture for common forms of mental illness.

The difference is not small either. Almost 9% of people with income from the poverty line (about $ 20,000 for a family of three) said they had suffered from “serious psychological distress”. This means that between 2009 and 2013, the years in which the survey was carried out, almost one in 10 of these people – and there are more than 40 million – have felt debilitating levels of anxiety and depression. On the other hand, barely more than 1% of those whose income has exceeded the poverty line four times or more said that they felt similar mental anxiety.

If you are someone who thinks that depression and anxiety are only sophisticated words for the blues – and just a good devoid and a boost to the ears can not repair – you may not find it too overwhelming. But before rejecting, it is hardly more than airy discussions of the usual bleeding hearts, you should keep two things in mind. One: Your vision of mental health is not only obsolete, but is increasingly the last refuge of people in the denial of their own needs. Two: there is an growing set of research showing that poverty damage is just as serious cognitively as they are psychologically.

As Cohn notes, however, the results of the CDC study, although Stark, do not tell us much about the cause and the effect. Do these people suffer from mental illness because they are poor? Or are they poor because they suffer from a mental illness? “”[M]Ost researchers, “writes Cohn,” believe that the process works in both directions “. Remember all these studies of the worst years of the great recession, those who find that unemployment for a long time can be more devastating for your emotional health than the death of a spouse.

It is therefore the internal and calm life of misery and despair that the American version of capitalism grants so many people. As bad, however, American pop culture apparently believes that it is not yet bad enough. And this is where Lyons’ play, which examines “La Mallette”, a new CBS odious reality show, intervenes. Because what “the case” does is to say to people who are unhappy enough to not only be poor but also to look at CBS that this mental anxiety is, ultimately, something they have brought to themselves.

Here is the premise of the show, as Lyons explains. A family dealing with what CBS calls for euphemistically “financial setbacks” receives a case full of $ 101,000. We then show them another family in the bottle of “financial setbacks” and they say that they must decide the amount of money to share – if necessary. With the knowledge of one or the other of the family, this configuration of alienation is presented to both. Lyons writes that in the first episodes sent to criticism, families find that their responsibility is so great that to vomit a woman and “several” to say that it is “the most difficult decision they have ever taken”.

How do they make such a decision? By engaging in a secure American tradition of separation of the poor into two mutually exclusive categories: those who deserve Be poor, and those who do not. “Families go to the other’s house and look through the invoices of others,” writes Lyons. Perhaps they could afford to pay the surgery of their children, if only they went from cheerios to frightful flakes! Essentially, CBS has decided that Ronald Reagan’s stories on the “queens of well-being” and “young dollars” using well-being to buy ferraris may not be technically true-but they are quite real for reality TV.

Lyon calls for this “altruism pornography”, but I think that even it gives CBS – and the culture that allows the costumes of the network to believe that “La Mallette” could be the next “extreme edition: Home edition” – too much credit. The pornography of altruism would imply an episode after the episode of charitable and good heart gifts. What is happening here is much more dehumanizing and requires much more buy-in from its victims. It’s not porn; It’s “The Hunger Games”. And in his own way, it’s no less violent.