Feeling the Need

I'd happened to swing by Slate again, to see if there was much of anything interesting there to read these days, and found this story about CUP Foods, the store where George Floyd had given the cashier what was suspected to be a counterfeit $20 bill. It turned out, that was a very ill-considered move on the part of the late Mr. Floyd, but the story was about the anger that local residents and activists harbored towards the store and the Palestinian family that owns the business.

Being the sort of person who is never content to simply read a news story and take it at face value, the whole thing came off to me as a tragic lesson in the effects of generational poverty on a community; in this case the Black community of South Minneapolis. I've written before about how I considered ethics to be something of a luxury, such that people who feel that they're in dire straits come to consider it something that's out of reach. I also think that a case could be made that many people consider following "the rules" (as a general principle) to be a luxury good; and again, something that can, and maybe should, be dispensed with if the cost goes too high. What Aymann Ismail's story communicated was that perhaps empathy and compassion should also be placed in the basket of expensive goods that many people feel are out of reach for them.

Stories of American decline are popular, and have been for some time, I think. Whether they are triumphalist or cautionary, however, I suspect that many of them miss the point. As the United States kludges its way into greater and greater inequality, the things that really hold a society marked by clear differences together, things like generally ethical behavior, commitment to the rules and a general understanding that everyone is on the same side, become luxuries. And when people feel that their survival is in danger, they jettison useless luxuries.

The promise of the United States, that it failed to live up to, was that it could be a place where people need not feel, for lack of a better word, needy. I suspect that it was an unrealistic promise from the outset. Because neediness isn't a objective state, but a personal one. The people that Mr. Ismail speaks to reveal the neediness of the South Minneapolis neighborhood. The worries that partisans have over the outcomes of today's elections for the United States Senate in Georgia reveal the neediness of Democrats and Republicans alike. The fighting over how the SARS-2 CoV outbreak, both here and in other countries, reveals the neediness of people, and governments, worldwide.

I don't know that it's possible to really remove neediness from the world. Perhaps that's the problem. People, in attempting to sate their own neediness, simply shift it onto other people. And at worst, they, well, infect other people with it, and neediness multiplies. And swamps luxuries in so doing.