In The Comments Section, You’re Always With Stupid

We have established that I’m a sucker for click bait, but apparently, I’m also a masochist. Some articles I read because they sound interesting, some because I wish to be informed, and some I read to see how ill-informed others are. No matter the content for the article, despite my intentions to leave the article well and good and alone, my fervent desires to avoid stupidity in all its forms, and the might with which I cling to the last vestiges of calm I have for the day, I find myself scrolling through the comments, basking in the dual light of human naivete and the foolishness of the dull-witted.

It’s not important which article inspired this post, because frankly, any opinion or view expressed on the internet attracts trolls. It’s a fact of nature, like flies on a corpse. You always have the same collection of comments. You have the racists, the collectively clueless, the hip and sarcastic, the ‘Murica rednecks, that guy who thinks he’s super clever but is actually an idiot; the list goes on. Today’s post was brought to you by an unholy mixture of the ‘Murica, faux-clever clueless:

“I love to see pictures of people dogging on Vince Neil’s looks and weight when they’re complete fat piles of poor white trash […] making $16.50 and [sic] hour.”

I’m not sure what prompted this comment, as the article in question wasn’t about Vince Neil in any way, but in fairness, it could be a reply to an earlier comment. I didn’t dig through all the comments to find out, because I was stuck on this one. Not the Vince Neil bit, but the poor white trash. Making $16.50 an hour.

Let me say that again for the people in the back: poor people making $16.50/hr.

Now, I live in a part of the USA where the cost of living is relatively low. The minimum wage is $7.65. Doing a quick bit of math, someone working full-time at minimum wage makes roughly $15,912 a year. That’s before taxes, deductions, or anything else. It’s not enough to live on. How do I know that? For one thing, I myself have worked with the same company for eight and a half years, and I make more than the minimum wage (yet far less than $16.50), and I barely scrape past 20k, and I can’t live on my own or fully support myself, and it’s just me. I’m not trying to spread <15k across a spouse and a kid or two. The person making $16.50/hr pulls in $34,320 before taxes. That’s an $18,408 difference.

Now I realize 34k isn’t a lot. It’s really not. If you pay $800/month for rent and utilities (which is unheard of, at least around here), that’s $9600. In 2013, USAToday estimated that a family of four spends on average $146-$289 a week in food. If we take the median figure for food, that’s $11,310. If I make $34,320 before taxes, and I manage to find the unicorn house/apartment of $800/month, and only spend $217.50 of food each week, I’m already down to $13,410. And that has to last for car payment/insurance/repair, home maintenance, gas, clothing, education, etc. Spread across the four imaginary people of this scenario, that’s really not a lot, even if you’re a minimalist home that doesn’t practice gift-giving on holidays.

I’m not picking on this guy. I just think that this is a symptom of the general ignorance people have when it comes to money and poverty, which is distressing because people can’t make informed decisions without, you know, being informed. When people think that someone making double the minimum wage is poor trash, what must they think of people who are making substantially less? It fosters a rotten system.

And the scariest part is? People like that can vote. Mercy!