Policy, Privilege and Pudding

Temptation incarnate

I have now told myself that I really need to cut down on my sugar habit at least five times since coming to Berkeley. To be clear, this only counts the times I have said this with the serious will power to try changing my eating habits. There are numerous other times when I have thought I ought to change my eating whilst eating a cookie or buying the fourth ice cream in the past five days. My poor fellow has had to deal with listening to me say on every one of these occasions that this time will be different or listen to me dwell excessively on how the day went in terms of eating sugar for the entire time. He’s been a good sport about it and doesn’t judge me for my inability to stay away.

I am about to start on my sixth endeavor. This time, I have set a time frame and I am planning on sticking to it. Even though it makes the hours seem so much longer as I continuously talk myself out of eating the chocolate pudding temptingly sitting in the fridge.

Every time I have had to restart my goal because of a brief cave-in (which usually lasts many more days than I care to admit), I realized how privileged I am. People don’t judge me for a moral failure because a) I am skinny b) I am rather well-off c) I have a good education.

There are, sadly, many who do not get the same privilege.

In this podcast, Lindy West, the author of Shrill and a columnist at The Guardian talks about some of the stigmas society holds for people who are fat (she says she doesn’t like the word overweight because it implies there is a correct weight). Among these is that people who are fat some how lack the moral fortitude to control themselves.

As skinny person, people usually tell me that I can get away with eating sugar and that I should enjoy it while I can. “After 30,” they say, “it all goes downhill.”

Barring the tacit agreement the world seems to have on the right for skinny people to eat whatever they want (even though this doesn’t necessarily mean they are healthy), my class on Social Welfare Policy has made me realize just how deep these beliefs go.

Because the truth is that our judgements about others greatly impact what kind of help we are willing to give to them. And this is true not only in terms of our personal interactions but at the policy level as well. The reality of American policy is that it is made by a bunch of old white men who live in a bubble and have the ultimate say in how our country treats the poor, the needy and the disadvantaged.

Much of the policy we talk about in class is related to the poor because much of the social welfare policy that is most debated is the policy that gives aid to the poor. Policy can fall under one of three philosophies, universal, earned or charity. An example of a universal policy is education. Earned welfare are Social Security and Medicare, both of which you have to work for in order to get the benefits. Charity are given to people who meet a certain criteria but they do not have to do anything to get the benefits.

Take a guess which one gives the least benefits, comes with a high degree of stigma and politicians in the US generally don’t like to give: charity. And take another guess who uses the charity benefits the most: people living in poverty.

The US is founded on values of personal responsibility, individual freedom and strong family values. In fact, the idea of America being a meritocracy has been around for centuries. If you tried hard enough, lived a good, moral and upright life, you could get anywhere in America. These are injected into every policy decision we make and in every value judgement we make as a society on swathes of the population. Overweight people are blamed for lacking responsibility for their own health, poor people have no financial responsibility.

I didn’t realize the importance of these values until I learned that the value most cherished in Finland is equity. Finland takes care of the homeless by providing social homes. Pregnant women and young mothers (and fathers) are taken care of through extensive prenatal and postnatal care. Preschool is universal and there are even talks for a basic income regardless of your employment status.

But if your fundamental beliefs are that people need to be able to pull themselves from the bootstraps then you will not be willing to give them any leeway for if they slip and fall.

Something fundamental has to change to remove these stigmas. Just as changing my eating habits is requiring me to change my thinking by paying more attention to what I eat and how much I eat, we need a societal shift in the way we think about helping other people and the effect helping them has on us as a whole. It's not an easy fix. But most things that matter rarely ever are easy.