Slumming It

Ever since the explosion of the internet and social media, people have started making a practice of going to places that they feel are “beneath” them, and filming themselves “experiencing” a different life. For obvious reasons, usually these people are rich and often they are white, giving the experience a colonial feel as well as an invasive boundary violation when people refuse to stop, even after being asked to by governments and local populations. There is a phrase that we developed in the empire for this kind of behavior, called “slumming it,” when the “elites” go into the “ghettos” of the world to show how “down” they are. However, at this point in time, it has become an addiction, and people need to stop going into poor places for validation instead of creating opportunities for people to not be poor.

There have been so many tax breaks for people with income, and the excuse has always been that people with excessive resources will create jobs, so everyone needs to handle them with velvet gloves to ensure that they feel inspired to help others. This has been and always will be nonsense, and the only thing that we have consistently seen is that when given wealth, “elites” double down on poor behavior and start becoming not just more controlling, but stingier with the dwindling opportunities that they offer. Meanwhile, everyone else is supposed to do Simone Biles gymnastics with our 4 pennies to create stable lives for ourselves, while being lectured about financial literacy. No one is noble for taking their resources that they took from poor communities on a return trip back to those poor communities. Maybe if they had not needed so much, there would be fewer poor communities for their entertainment, which is something the “elites” seem to need.

While discussing this, rich women need to stop hiding behind gender to absolve themselves of “slumming it” by going into places where they fetch their servants. Nobody asked them for their patronage, and if rich women are equally obnoxious, there is no more value to their presence in poor communities than there is for rich men. We have all been made aware that there are people who enact atrocities, and then play the victim and hide behind gender to flee from accountability. At this point in time, an adult is an adult is an adult, and rich women do not get to “girl boss” their way through life, choose to exploit people, and then claim oppression when under scrutiny. That is an old, tired tale that people are not buying anymore.

Effectively, the upper echelons of society need to stop cosplaying as poor or “exploring” poverty and start doing something to erase the issue. No one asked for such selfishness, and a refusal to invest in areas is just hoarding with prettier language. The goal of reality should be to eliminate impoverished areas, not create content so that people feel “good” about “elites” engaging with the reality they have created.