"Dude I hate poor people"

Ian Parker has a riveting article in the current issue of The New Yorker (seriously, is there any pub on this earth better than this magazine?) about Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate had cyber-spied on him and tweeted "I saw him making out with a dude. Yay." The article could be a textbook example of how poorly informed we generally are about real world events, and yet how we rarely let that stop us from projecting all our fears and anger onto people unfortunate enough to get caught in the public limelight.

None of which is to say the roommate doesn't have some accounting to do for his spying, mind you. Just that the public hatred directed at him was clearly misdirected. As his trial approaches, the best anyone can say about how justice should be meted out here was perhaps best summarized as such:

Paula Dow, then New Jersey’s Attorney General, said, “Sometimes the laws don’t always adequately address the situation. That may come to pass here.”

What Parker manages to do in his article is flesh out the personalities and motivations of both roommates and make you like and dislike them both more than possible with the information about them that came out on the heels of the tragedy. I have a very hard time feeling bad for the roommate who spied, but it's really not clear at all that his actions were directly responsible for Clementi's suicide. What is clear is that the roommate, Dharun Ravi, was not a monster, but more or less an average teenager with an obnoxious streak and very poor judgement about other people's rights to privacy.

More than that, though (and the central brilliance of Parker's article), is how it exposes so much about a culture with a moral compass that's completely on the fritz. There's a slightly Orton-esque theme running throughout the piece, confirming that the harder we work to conceal our meaning, the more our words generally reveal our true selves. More than that, though, the behind the scene chats of both roommates reveal young adults with very little certitude about right or wrong. Take for example Ravi's response to perceiving that his new roommate wasn't wealthy:

Once Ravi understood that he would be living with Clementi, not Picone, he felt that he knew these essential facts: his roommate was gay, profoundly uncool, and not well off. If the first attribute presented both a complication and a happy chance to gossip, the second and third were perceived as failings. “I was fucking hoping for someone with a gmail but no,” Ravi wrote to Tam. Clementi’s Yahoo e-mail address symbolized a grim, dorky world, half seen, of fish tanks and violins. Ravi’s I.M.s about Tyler’s presumed poverty were far more blunt than those about sexual orientation. At one point during his exchanges with Tam that weekend, Ravi wrote, “Dude I hate poor people.”

Side note: can't let it pass without mentioning that Ravi is passing judgement on Clementi's "coolness" even though he himself played hours of Ultimate Frisbee and logged an astonishing number of tweets. Clearly, coolness is relative.

But compassion isn't.

Disdain for the poor is perhaps the single clearest indication of a dangerous degree of narcissism in my opinion. Anyone who "hates" the poor is clearly too dim to understand "there, but for the grace of God, go I" and that makes them a threat to everyone else.

Ambivalence about the poor is no better. While it's only fair to assume his words didn't come out as intended, Mitt Romney's recent declaration that "I’m not concerned about the very poor," is perhaps another Ortonesque uttering. Despite himself, his words revealed the true Mitt. I know that sounds harsh, but given his track record of consistently putting profits over the needs of working class people, while heading Bain, I'll stand behind that assessment until prove otherwise (and his easy ability to donate millions to charities, mostly within his Church, doesn't exactly make him Mother Teresa in my book).

Sincere concern for the very poor is one of the hallmarks of most major religions, including Romney's (although, granted, the LDS church only added “to care for the poor and needy” to its longstanding “threefold mission,” in 2009...maybe Mitt missed that memo). His stated ambivalence (suggesting the safety net we know his party is hellbent on dismantling frees him from needing to focus on their plight) must rank among the most cynical and uncharitable of statements any politician running for President has ever made.

Our national moral compass needs a good whack.