This week the wealthiest man in the world tweeted a photo of an attractive blonde woman smiling broadly, along with the caption:
“Watching [the administration] slash Federal programs, knowing it doesn’t affect you because you’re not a member of the Parasite Class.”
In other words, the woman is not poor. Here, “Parasite Class” is referring to those who are poor, and therefore, who need the assistance provided by Federal programs such as Medicaid and the Child Health Protection Act.
Vilification of the poor is not new. Poverty has a stigma attached to it that helps to perpetuate it across generations. It’s easier to blame people for living in poverty than to do the work of understanding the systems that benefit the haves and penalize the have-nots. People living in poverty tend to have lower self-esteem, struggle to hang onto a sense of dignity and self-worth, and can experience feelings of shame—all of which contribute to the cycle of poverty, as they can cause crises of mental and physical health.
As of 2024, the United States was the ninth wealthiest country in the world, according to our gross domestic product, but our levels of poverty over the past forty years remain basically consistent, making up between 11 and 15 percent of our population. Currently, 37.9 million Americans live in poverty, and roughly half of that number live in deep poverty, meaning they are striving to live on income 50% or more below the poverty line. And poverty isn’t experienced equally across races. In the U.S., while our overall poverty rate stands at about 11%, more than 25% of Black and Hispanic people experience poverty.
And this week, someone who has enormous influence over government programs called these people, these human beings made in God’s image, the Parasite Class.
Today, Jesus has something to say about poverty…
Image: JESUS MAFA. The Sermon on the Mount, Cameroon, painting, 1973, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48284 [retrieved January 21, 2025]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact).
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