Had humans the life-span of a mayfly, it might be tolerable to have this discussion every season. Nearly 30 years ago, Clinton's "welfare as we know it" reform

Had humans the life-span of a mayfly, it might be tolerable to have this discussion every season. Nearly 30 years ago, Clinton's "welfare as we know it" reforms were being normalized by the likes of the New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR smart set who were doing the heavy "interpretive labor" of explaining why poor trash waste hundreds of dollars (careful, those are 1990's dollars!) on crap like track suits and sneakers which ultimately reduced to so much status-quo-affirming "empathy". These discussions focused primarily on black people, not more generally on poor, disenfranchised people. The message was that you needn't worry about it because it was a "minority" problem. Since then, how has the conversation permuted? It has simply become more performative and more mired in the vocabulary of race. Now that it is a problem of race, not class, one merely needs to be "empathetic", which, incidentally, is free. During Clinton's reign, the discussion about the regression to a society with classes like the 30's (upstairs/downstairs) was handled more abstrusely than the easy pre-chewed treacle about racism/welfare (much easier to mouth platitudes or diatribes about black people or the villian du jour than address the fundamental unfairness between capital and labor). Whatever is systemic has to do with power, and power cares not a whit what you look like, how you talk, or what hole you prefer to fuck or be fucked in. People need to stop looking at the color or location of their fuck-hole and simply find solidarity in the fact they are fucked. But this, like the possibility of the public lending-library being invented today, is nil.