Whenever I hear right-wing pundits whine about entitlements and complain about food stamps and Medicaid benefits for all the shirkers and welfare cheats, I have to shake my head in wonderment. As I understand it, entitlements are those “benefits” that come our way by just being citizens. Programs like Social Security and Medicare, programs that not even a nutcase like Marjorie Taylor Greene would dare to do away with.
For me, the word has other meanings as well. Whenever I think of my fellow baby boomers and our progeny, I have a real sense that those of us — the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants at any rate — seem to walk around with an inflated sense that somehow we “deserve” all the good things in life that have come our way.
College education, home ownership, stock portfolios, cars and wardrobes that reflect who we are. There were once “yuppies” not too many years ago.
What best defined this swath of our population was an attitude that looked a lot more like John D. Rockefeller than Mother Teresa. “I’ve got mine, you’re on your own, buddy.” This could have been the motto of the “what’s in it for me?” generation.
Underlying such cynicism is that old entitlement again. I’m well off in all the markers which define success American-style, not because I was born white, raised in a comfortable suburban community, enjoyed a stable home life, and was born male into a well-connected family. No. In some dimly perceived way, I am where I am today because I deserve to be … without knowing exactly why or what it might mean for the millions not so lucky. I am entitled while so many others are not.
When this smug acceptance of what it is to be well-off is paired with blaming the poor and attributing their circumstances to individual character flaws, we can see how far we have drifted from being our brother’s keeper.
When this cultural narcissism is projected on an even larger scale, we see how European superpowers have always justified their conquests. Why don’t our colonial ancestors question their right to steal a vast land from indigenous peoples along with the genocide which made that theft possible? Somehow, we were entitled to tame that wilderness and bring order out of chaos. Why? It was our duty to bring civilization to the savages whose land we covered.
As despicable as was our treatment of the Native peoples, what the Spaniards inflicted upon “Latin America” made our subjugation of tribal nations seem almost tame. Why were the conquistadors entitled to massacre and enslave entire populations in order to plunder their mineral wealth? Although at the point of the sword, Christian redemption was thereby brought to the New World and who could want more?
Empires flourished with the expropriation of natural resources and cheap labor. Where once there were galleons heavy laden with pirated Aztec gold, now there were oil tankers sailing from distant ports to feed the West’s almost insatiable appetite for petroleum.
When the world’s most powerful nations had finished carving up the globe, it was time for burgeoning international capitalists to seek their own pound of Third World flesh. Where once this thievery fattened the exchequers of the crowned heads of Europe, it was now Shell, Standard and British Petroleum. These oil titans were entitled to extract profit from the black gold pumped from oilfields in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.
Occasionally, nationalist leaders of these poor, vulnerable countries tried to push back. A democratically elected president of Guatemala sought land reform as a way of restoring sufficiency to the landless peasants. United Fruit Company and the CIA disagreed and he was overthrown. The banana giant was entitled to keep millions of acres uncultivated while indigenous peoples lived near-starvation, landless existences.
About the same time, another democratically elected president, Mosaddegh of Iran, felt the oil underground, by rights, belonged to his countrymen. He offered compensation to British Petroleum but, once again, the CIA colluded in a coup d’état. Cardenas of Mexico was more successful in nationalizing Mexico’s oil reserves in 1938 and his patriotism is still celebrated as a national holiday.
The idea that national resources — whether mineral or rich soil — rightfully belong to anyone other than the folks who live and work there seems a strange idea to me.
The single mom with a fistful of food stamps at a grocery checkout? Sure. I suppose this is a form of entitlement. What about the young, upwardly mobile professional with a six-figure salary who forgets that his station in life is by luck of the draw and little else? Or the nation state and multinational corporation which, without offering a reason why, feel entitled to exploit other people’s natural wealth?
Go figure.
McGehee, a lifelong activist, settled here in 1973 and lives in Palouse with his wife, Katherine. His work life has varied from bartender to university instructor to wrecking yard owner.
