Vice President Kamala Harris gave the public its first real look into her nascent presidential campaign with a stop at her organization’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware on Monday night.
Harris’ first applause line came when she discussed her background as California attorney general and as a courtroom prosecutor.
“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said, earning cackles while she beamed, clearly enjoying the joke. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
I have thought the same thing before - used to live in a house where the windows didn’t even close, calculate food budget to the cent, could feed myself dinner for 35c and would spend two hours driving for an extra hour of pay. Not there any more fortunately.
I think saying “we shouldn’t complain as others are worse” is putting thinking in the wrong direction. If you can’t enjoy your life with enough to get by then that also needs to be fixed - don’t short your own efforts and struggle.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t at all feel “we shouldn’t complain as others are worse”.
My situation is not nearly as bad as your former situation, nor that of many others. If I use the same terms to describe my situation as theirs, I feel I’m minimizing their difficulties by doing so. Yes, it would only take a couple of substantial setbacks to put us in that situation now, but that’s a very different thing than already being there.
In any case, I do think prioritizing the “working poor” is fine, and also that the “struggling middle class” are likely to be co-beneficiaries of many improvements that help the working poor if steps are taken there.