Open Season: The Conservative Assault on California’s Poor

Recently the Los Angeles Times reported that in order to combat a $24 billion gap in the state budget, California’s governor Arnold Schwartzenegger proposed to eliminate the following:

1. The Cal Works program, which providegers financial help for over 500,000 low income families,
2. Healthy Families, which is the provides medical coverage to nearly a million young people, and…
3. Cal Grants, which provides funds for low income students to attend college who would otherwise not be able to go.

These cuts would virtually kill the safety net that California’s poor so desperately needs, especially in these times, as well as leave millions of people without health care, funds for college, and money for essentials such as food and rent.

Since Schwartzenegger is a Republican and a conservative, I was not that surprised about him wanting to make cuts, particularly in light of this mini-economic depression, which is what this crisis is.

Though I have always felt this way, what the dear Terminator wants to do has convinced me more than ever that…

• Conservatives do not care about poor people.
• Conservatives do not care about the underprivileged, particularly the young.
• Conservatives do not care about the health of poor people and poor children.
• Conservatives do not care about the education of poor people.

Why else have conservative Republicans, whenever they have been in power, have enacted policies that have robbed the less fortunate of jobs, medical care, and housing, oftentimes throwing them out into the street.

It is clear to me that there has never been a more heartless population of people during the past fifty years than conservative Americans.

These are the people that tell you to “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”. But what if you can’t afford any boots, as is the case with millions of people in this country.

These are the people that would rather have a jobless, homeless, and hungry person – who is often unable to obtain employment due to things like mental illness or disability, and who has no family – fall through the cracks and rot.

These are the people who, if they were with Jesus 2,000 years ago when those 5,000 followers needed food, would have told him to let them starve while they divided the five loaves of bread and two fishes among themselves.

And these are the people who, if someone had hit on misfortune and was unable to pay the rent or mortgage, would throw them out onto the street without any feelings or remorse. If children were involved, they’d be thrown out, too – who cares if a five-year-old has to sleep on a park bench?

Yep, conservatives are cold, unfeeling, uncaring, and heartless toward their fellow man, particularly if such fellow man is down on his luck. Just like the school yard bully who takes lunch money from little kids and laughs at their tears.

I personally noticed this heartlessness when I was a teenager in the 1980s.

In Santa Monica, CA, where I grew up, I noticed during that decade a considerable rise in homelessness, of more and more people with medical conditions and mental illness, or who had lost a job, sleeping on the streets and in the parks; Palisades Park, a famous recreation area located on the bluffs overlooking the beach and the Pacific Ocean, became a neighborhood of transients during that time, with tents and shopping carts popping up all over the place. 

All of this happened during the years after Ronald Reagan was elected president. Coincidence? I think not. Reagan cut off funding for the state mental hospitals during that time, throwing those poor souls, whom everyone knew couldn’t take care of themselves, out on the street.

Talk about heartless and uncaring, eh?

But back to Schwartzenegger – he has certainly shown his true colors by proposing these cuts. He has shown that he wants to throw families onto the streets, deny children healthcare, and deny young people access to a college education, which is exactly what will happen should these cuts come to fruition.

I know full well that GOP conservatives will be incensed upon reading this. They will call me a naive Communist, a Socialist, politically correct pinko who does not understand what makes America great.

They will call me a lazy slacker who doesn’t want to work and sacrifice and who only wants a free ride, who wants to tax the heart and soul out of hard working people.

And you know what? That’s OK.

I am a guy who wants to see people who cannot take care of themselves (and believe me, there are plenty of those out there) be taken care of in this country. Who wants all those less fortunate souls who need help to be able to get that help freely, quickly, and easily. And who wants to see poverty eradicated by any means necessary, unlike conservatives who only care about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

If that makes me a Socialist, then I wholeheartedly plead guilty.

I once read somewhere that one can truly judge a society by how they take care of its poor.

If that is the case, then the United States gets a big, fat “F-minus” grade in that aspect. Because no other developed country has treated its poor worse than America has.

I freely admit that I don’t have all the answers as to how to deal with this economic crisis in my home state of California.

But I do know that what our governor is proposing will solve nothing and will cause nothing but suffering and desperate hardship to those who can afford it the least.

And that makes me angry and sad.

My only hope is that the senators and state assembly in Sacramento will fight and do what ever they need to do to prevent these cuts in education, health, and welfare from happening. Surely this crisis can be dealt with without putting the burden on the poor and underprivileged. They have certainly suffered enough.

No one wants to see California – and the rest of the U.S. – recover from this mini-depression more than me, but these cuts are NOT the way to go about it.

That’s all I am trying to say.