Who's Really Lazy? Or, Projection Is An Amazing Drug

It's always amazing and sickening to me to hear rich fucks condemn poor people - especially poor black people - for being "lazy."  Amazing and sickening because the rich fucks saying that have never worked a day in their lives.

No, sitting in front of a camera denouncing the people whose poverty supports your lazy rich ass is not work.  Sitting in front of a computer watching your money make more money is not work. Sitting at a desk ordering underlings to evict renters so you can sell their apartments as condos to other rich fucks is not work.

Work is cleaning the toilets in the buildings where the rich fucks pretend to work.  Work is serving food you can't afford to rich fucks who don't tip because that would be encouraging your "laziness."  Work is juggling three minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table.

As Melissa Harris-Perry once exclaimed in a memorable television moment, being poor is hard work.  It always has been.  Keeping it that way is yet another legacy of the confederacy that needs to be swept away.

In a fascinating article on radical Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay, the Smithsonian captured this quote:

Enslaved men, Lay noted, would “Plow, sow, thresh, winnow, split Rails, cut Wood, clear Land, make Ditches and Fences, fodder Cattle, run and fetch up the Horses.” He saw enslaved women busy with “all the Drudgery in Dairy and Kitchen, within doors and without.” These grinding labors he contrasted with the idleness of the slave owners—the growling, empty bellies of the enslaved and the “lazy Ungodly bellies” of their masters. Worse, he explained with rising anger, slave keepers would perpetuate this inequality by leaving these workers as property to “proud, Dainty, Lazy, Scornful, Tyrannical and often beggarly Children for them to Domineer.”