Do you think society (the media, advertising) shame(s) the poor?

Question

Examples: Buy a $30,000 car to save the evironment from toxins; food is trash unless it's organic or bought in a "natural" supermarket; if you don't have a baby monitor, you're negligent. Also smokers are taxed the highest, ,even though they're often the poorest (yes there are luxury taxes for the rich, but not for such an "inelastic" good).

Answer 1

Advertising exists to get people to buy things they don't need so they use all human emotions including shame. The target is the well off since the poor can not afford much beyond their basic needs but it has spillover effect making the poor feel inadequate. You can see it in the expensive shoes and clothing poor teenagers want. The assumption in the US that everyone has a equal opportunity so being poor shows you are inferior probably does more harm to poor people's, or even middle class people's, self image that product promotion.
The taxing of cigarettes is more of a way to raise revenue in a way the does not effect the majority than to offset the medical cost of smokers. Old people impose a cost on society and everyone dies of something, so If smoking hastens death it might even save society money.

Answer 2

Sure , and that is the way it has always been. Read your history books on any culture and you will see that this is so. A shame really.

As for your inference on Smokers and how they are the ones who are from poor neighborhoods, well, they really cannot afford to keep killing themselves that way anyway. It costs billions in tax dollars for health care and medicines to boot because of this horrible habit. I am not being high and mighty, I smoke as well, but I did applaud the new tax on cigarettes and am hoping that it will be a deterent for people to not start smoking or stop smoking all together.
Most things that are healthy or are health related in this society is private enterprise and therefore makes it only available to the rich. Does a low income welfare recipient feel guilty about not buying such a car as a hybrid? Probably not, they probably never even heard of it and pollution would not be a first priority in their lives,,,, they are busy thinking of ways to keep food on the table and to pay their bills, not save an environment. Do they think about health foods? I doubt it, the organic market which by the way has no FDA regulations on it (so it could be anything) has made it so expensive and unattainable to the middle class on down, that we just try and avoid the bad stuff and not worry too much about where they say it is grown. As far as baby monitors are concerned I think that most people do have a baby montor now days.... you can buy them used or borrow them from friends and they are not so expensive that you cannot afford one at some point. Usually people in these circumstances have someone right there at all times to over see the baby anyways so a monitor may not be necessary. Monitors are for people that can afford to have their own space and be in anothe room a way from the baby .... you have to have the ";uxury" of walking away before you would need a device to make walking away safe. Sad but true.

Answer 3

properly, they do no longer likely play a great place in recent times in our society. that's going to; that way it may be much less complicated to coach human beings the fact, to coach them to BE... yet you recognize, it rather is component of the Plan for Destruction: injury the experience of Honour and shame, injury compassion, empathy and the experience of fact... and you injury a civilization. and that's what's been happening for the final... i do no longer understand, i assumed it were 6 or 7 years, yet I investigated further, and it appears that evidently's been happening because of the fact the beginning up of the 70's... pay attention of this "my fact is distinctive out of your fact, yet the two are actual" difficulty, because of the fact it may deliver approximately absolute atrocities... in many senses... that's already making human beings somewhat loopy. in basic terms go searching... And all, because of the fact human beings have lost their values. No classic values, no danger to alter values to a miles better way of life.

Answer 4

Do the media shame the poor? That is like asking, on the morning of a fox hunt, whether the hounds shame the fox, or shame the hunters.