“When I decided to hit Bush with the shoe, it was a natural reaction, to the killing of a million of my people, the orphaning of five million children, resulting in tens of thousands of handicapped persons, tens of thousands of prisoners in American jails in Iraq, and the everyday scandals caused by the American occupation: rape, Abu Ghraib prison, bringing down roofs on people’s heads with Apache helicopters and F16 planes. Despite all this, Bush was saying the Iraqi people are happy, and the Americans liberated the Iraqi people.”
Muntadhar al-Zaidi
The quote above does not turn up any results in Google outside of Tumblr; but in 2009, Muntazer al-Zaidi wrote “Why I threw the shoe” about his reasoning & actions. He deserves not to be misquoted & to actually have his own words heard & elevated.
The Washington Post has an article up about al-Zaidi for the tenth anniversary of the shoe throwing incident, that also goes into more detail on the political context at hand & how al-Zaidi was imprisoned and tortured afterwards.
His bravery & conviction are commendable, and both those articles are worth the read.
OP: It’s awful the direction income inequality has taken in recent decades. Productivity is up, the stock market is up, the money is there, but working-class wages haven’t risen to match. Our generation is poorer than our parents, and many of us will never be able to buy homes, help our children pay for college, or retire.
Commenters: Sounds like someone needs a Personal Finance Lesson!!!! Try putting away just a few dollars at a time and you’ll be amazed how it adds up, sweaty :))))
Also: it’s frustrating how often the Personal Finance Lesson comes out to “have you tried living desperately?”
It’s understandable, if someone is in a jam or saving up for a major expense, that they might have to spend a few years living in a cramped and/or far-flung place, eating cheaply, thrifting clothes, and so forth.
It is not okay if this is the lifelong condition of people who are working full-time.
I don’t blame the personal-finance-advice people, nothing they say is technically wrong, but it’s frustrating and exhausting that this is where our society is at. Where “tighten your belt and live without any luxuries” is advice not for students or people recovering from financial catastrophe, but for adult professionals.
Sure, if all you can afford is rice and beans, then it’s helpful to get some recipes for spicing up rice and beans. But it shouldn’t fool you into thinking that spicy beans is all you deserve, that there’s nothing wrong with a world where CEOs have scientific-notation amounts of money and the working class is scolding each other not to waste money on name-brand beans.
“Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty.
But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It
is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or
country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man
should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He
should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the
rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.”
Oscar Wilde said that.
Also, if you’re disabled no amount of saving will do you any good. The state has already decided how much you get, and that’s it. That’s the limit. You can never rise above poverty unless you miraculously get better, and they don’t want to give SSI to people who might get better to begin with.
1985: National Geo make millions from ‘Afghan Girl’ portrait
2016: Still has the status of a refugee and may spend 14 years in jail because of her papers
I fucking hate this picture and everything it represents. Steve McCurry made millions off of this picture and its what launched his photojournalism career into the spotlight. While the woman in this picture got absolutely NOTHING and lived an awful and horrific existence. And calling her “Afghan Girl” is so disrespectful. Her name is Sharbat Gula and her life could have been made 1000X easier had McCurry shared his wealth with her - or even if he couldn’t find her, to share it with of refugees who he exploited. And honestly the idea of a white man going into wartorn nations (that are that way bc of american imperialism) to take pictures of refugees to profit off of their pain and trauma is gross
