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There’s a certain kind of news story that is presented as heartwarming but actually evinces the ravages of American inequality under capitalism: the account of an eighth grader who raised money to eliminate his classmates’ lunch debt, or the report on a FedEx employee who walked twelve miles to and from work each day until her co-workers took up a collection to buy her a car. We can be so moved by the way people come together to overcome hardship that we lose sight of the fact that many of these hardships should not exist at all. In a recent article for the journal Social Text, the lawyer and activist Dean Spade cites news reports about volunteer boat rescues during Hurricane Harvey which did not mention the mismanagement of government relief efforts, or identify the possible climatological causes of worsening hurricanes, or point out who suffers most in the wake of brutal storms. Conservative politicians can point to such stories, which ignore the social forces that determine the shape of our disasters, and insist that voluntarism is preferable to government programs.Share
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