The real root of my anger was that Joe implied that the rural folks he met had “taken care of their own” while the urban poor, many of whom paid with their lives, lacked the gumption or the human sympathy to help out their neighbors.  No, that’s not a personal attack on me, but it infuriated me that such a statement should just be allowed to hang out there uncriticized – as though removing people from a vast ghetto is a comparable operation to evacuating, a small town, as though there has never been anything like institutionalized racism, as though the rural, white poor are not in fact a larger burden on the welfare state,  as though we were all born on even playing field, as though the government is the enemy and not made up of our own friends and neighbors.  That really stuck in my craw.

I apologize for saying you’re self-blind, Joe.  I don’t now you well enough to say that, and I wouldn’t want to talk with you in person having let that phrase stand, which was how I knew I needed to apologize.  But I stand by the rest of my arguments.

Eating Humble Pie,

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: "Christopher J Stuart" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 11:20:02 -0400
Subject: Re: RE: [UTCSTAFF] Why did the New Orleans situation fall apart as it              did?

To Joe Dumas and My Reading Public (which I’m guessing is shrinking),

A certain friend of Joe’s has written to me to suggest that I ought not to have broadcast my “personal” attack.  On looking over what I sent, I regret one phrase, the accusation that you are “self-blind.”  For that phrase I apologize.  Truly, I mean it.  I seem to be having to apologize a lot today.

I think, however, that mostly my message merely connected dots that most people who are not so anti-government long ago connected for themselves, the dots between the taxpayer and the professor at the public institution that is made an affordable institution for the masses by precisely the sorts of government subsidies of professorial salaries and other expenses that Libertarian philosophy finds so abhorrent.  People vote.  They elect officials who vote on taxes.  The taxpayers write the checks.  Folks hired by the state get paid.  That’s how it works.  The buildings and offices we work in are paid for by the state.  I know three, maybe four, self-professed Libertarians.  Every last one of them is on the public bankroll.  I find that hypocritical to a certain extent, and I will continue to be unafraid to point it out.  

The real root of my anger was that Joe implied that the rural folks he met had “taken care of their own” while the urban poor, many of whom paid with their lives, lacked the gumption or the human sympathy to help out their neighbors or themselves.  No, tha
Christopher Stuart
UC Foundation Associate Professor
English Department
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga


Christopher Stuart
UC Foundation Associate Professor
English Department
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga