Watching Yvette Carnell from Breaking Brown is always an educational experience. However, some of the callers who weigh in sometimes offer ridiculous advice; advice that they would never themselves want to follow.
One such caller made an appearance at the end of a Dec 4 2017 show titled “The Republican Tax bill is Potentially Apocalyptic For Our Community”. The caller references a terrible situation where a hookworm outbreak was caused by a woefully inadequate sewage system in Lowndes County, Alabama.
The caller says the following to Yvette Carnell, the host of the show:
“I have a problem with the fact that if you have men in that area — they should get a shovel. They should go out to the woods. They should dig a hole. They should try to alleviate pressures off of themselves.
…I see a lot of people — they don’t try to alleviate problems in their own situation.”
(call starts at around 1 hour 34 minutes)
Understand what this caller is saying. The caller is advising that you shovel your own sh!t and not depend on government to offer the resources you are inevitably paying for when you pay taxes or water/sewage bills.
If Sean Hannity said to poor black people with inadequate sewer systems that they should shovel their own sh!t and stop looking for a government handout, everybody’s hair would be on fire.
But when Republican based laissez faire policies come out of the mouth of black people, nobody is supposed to challenge it? Get. The. Entire. Fck.
The caller said “get a shovel” to “alleviate” the problem of not having an adequate sewage system for a community of people. Ok. Let’s go find the end of the Earth since this person is clearly making an argument just as ridiculous as “the Earth is flat”.
If Yvette had enough time (and patience), she could have walked the caller through their ridiculous advice by asking:
1. Equipment – What type of equipment and number of “shovels” are required to maintain that sewage system? Literally, how many “shovels” are necessary? What happens if the total price to obtain that equipment is beyond what they can afford?
Who’s paying for the shovels? Who’s paying for the safety equipment? What happens when a shovel breaks? If the shovels are donated, what will the community have to give up — in terms of power and being used as props by the donors — in return for that “donation”?
Who’s responsible for maintaining/housing/protecting the shovels from theft? What happens if a fire occurs where the shovels are being kept and they need to be replaced immediately? Are the shovels insured in case of theft or fire?
If they could afford to insure all the equipment necessary to maintain a sewage system and individually repair that system, they wouldn’t be suffering such an injustice in the first place!
2. Health and Manpower – Working in sewage is a terrible job without the correct safety equipment. At any given time, are there enough HEALTHY adult men able to “get a shovel” in the community?
If people are sick with hookworms, how are there enough healthy men to “get a shovel” to continuously maintain the sewer system? A one-time fix won’t do. People are always producing waste. It will require constant upkeep.
What happens if too many men get sick at once? Who’s paying their medical bills? Who’s buying the medication? What type of insurance do these men need in order to be seen by non-predatory physicians?? What happens in the meantime while these men are recovering?
What are their preexisting issues? The obesity rate for black people in all of Alabama is 44%. Aside from that, blacks have higher instances of diabetes and other health issues.
So, in addition to hookworm outbreaks, are they suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure and other illnesses which make it impossible to continuously do the type of physical labor required to maintain a sewage system? Bruh.
3. 10,000 per 100,000 – Targeting black men and imprisoning them to be sold as corporate slaves to private companies is real. For every 100,000 black men who exist, 10,000 of them are jailed. That’s astronomical. In contrast, for every 100,000 black men who existed during Apartheid, only 851 were jailed.
Ask this caller how many men are still in that community who haven’t gotten caught in the sharp teeth of the prison industrial complex? How many are there to “get a shovel” and “dig a hole” to bury the community’s waste??
4. Work – While the community has to “get a shovel” to keep the sh!t from sickening everybody, who will go to work? Obviously, no government entity will pay you to shovel your own sh!t, right?
That means someone has to leave the community to work to make money for equipment purchases. It also means a criminal record has to be non-existent if they want a decent paying job.
As mentioned earlier, are they healthy enough to work? Hookworms cause nausea, fever, rash, intestinal cramps, etc. If they have to constantly take time off to recover from hookworm infections, how long will they remain employed before their bosses fire them? Who’s paying for their medicine and hospital bills?
The unemployment rate in Alabama for blacks is damn near 11% (only 4.4% for whites). Who will hire these people? Is Alabama a ‘Right to Work'(for less) state? Do they have any job security?
If they can’t work, they can’t afford to buy the tools necessary to maintain their sewage system. Who’s going to step in and purchase additional safety equipment as needed? Not to mention, if a number of these men can’t work because of criminal histories or because they can’t find adequate employment, what happens in the meantime?
If they had stable employment with adequate wages, they wouldn’t be living in a fcking community with no septic tanks to begin with!
5. Safety regulations – Who in the community is knowledgeable enough about planning routes for sewage removal and treatment in a community? Huh? Who in the community has been able to obtain the kind of training necessary to make that happen? Is that even a plan which can be handled by one or two individuals?
Where are they going to send the waste? Waste has to be treated and not left out to fester and contaminate drinking water, plants/crops, etc.
Are other communities going to let those people move their waste out of their hookworm-neighborhood and through the nice clean neighborhoods? What’s the plan for when the hookworm-neighborhood’s waste starts to affect the surrounding areas because they lacked the planning and resources to prevent contamination??
—
I mean!! There was smoke coming from my head listening to that nonsense. The things people say!
Some people still don’t understand how they are sustained by a gigantic system of interconnected pieces which is supposed to be maintained by a body large enough to plan and execute decisions to benefit everybody.
This caller would never, in a million years, want to live in a situation where they had to shovel their own sh!t in addition to every other struggle they have to handle on a daily basis.
Do you know what government is? Do you understand the function and importance of government in the richest country in the world? If I wanted to live like that, I’d move to some impoverished 3rd world country. No, wait. I wouldn’t move because I can’t afford the fcking trip!
If government is like a car, that means you can’t take your hands off the wheel AND be pi$sed at the direction in which the car is going. I don’t have a step-by-step detailed plan on how to solve the Lowndes County problem. But, I have sense enough to know that telling people to shovel their own sh!t in a 1st world country isn’t the fcking answer. -_-
Source Material
* https://thegrio.com/2015/03/01/incarcerated-black-america-past-present-and-future/