"You can just"

[firecat]

About providing food for your family when you don't have a lot of money, and the thoughtless advice that people sometimes give if they don't know much about a difficult problem you have, especially if they give the advice using the adverb "just" (with the "it's so simple" connotation).

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/08/31/you-can-just/

Comments

[spiderdust]

The article nicely sums up what I've been thinking lately.

While we technically have a decent income, we fall into the "mortgaged poor" category. The calculations done when determining whether or not we could afford a house were based on income plus regularly occurring bonuses, and we also had fewer family members at the time. Mere months after we purchased the house, the bottom fell out of the economy and the value of the house dropped (but our mortgage payments stayed the same!). Shortly after that, we discovered we were having another baby. Changes in the economy meant fewer bonuses, more people in the household meant our expenses increased, and you can see where this goes.

Whenever I express frustration over yet one more financial obstacle put in our path, often well-meaning friends tell me to learn to cook with legumes, to cut down on "frivolous" things like cable and going out to eat, to start a garden in my back yard, and to turn off more lights and wear more sweaters in the winter.

Stuff like this makes me crazy, despite my knowing that it comes from a well-intentioned point of view. It assumed that 1) I don't already know to do these things, 2) that I wasn't already doing them, and 3) that I'm even able to do the things that I wasn't already doing.

And the viewpoint of "just do this" also sends the implication that I have an easily avoided problem, so therefore it must be my fault that it's still an issue.

[firecat]

Well said.