“The Carrot and The Stick Can Solve Every Problem”
Once again, we have more tools than just force and violence!
In another one of our Supreme Court’s centuries-long list of staggeringly abusive rulings, it is now illegal to be homeless. Or, more accurately, cities and police departments can use punitive measures against unhoused people for the crime of *checks notes* having nowhere to go. Because, yunno, freedom means criminalizing poverty. How will people find the motivation to stop being poor if they aren’t being ticketed and jailed?!
I think it was the start of the Gulf War where I was first told about the concept of carrot and the stick. I was six years old when the US decided to insert itself into that conflict, and as a very justice oriented tiny human, I had A LOT of questions. Specifically, why wasn’t there any way to do whatever it was we needed to do in this war - I knew it was something about oil - without all the, well, war? If Saddam Hussein was such a bad guy, why didn’t we just go in and kill him instead of blowing up people and families? Wouldn’t that mitigate some of the collateral damage? (The answer I was given to this query was, “We don’t do that”, meaning we don’t assassinate leaders of other countries. Fine. We’ll pretend the School of the Americas just never happened.)
Photo by cottonbro studio
Being a dangerously curious child, I continued to ask questions about the course of action our country was taking. The answers I was given were incredibly reductive. In this case, I was told you hold out a carrot to “motivate” people to do what you want while holding a stick so they can clearly see if they don’t cooperate, they will get hit. In this case, the stick was literal bombs. I don’t remember the carrot.
This answer was deeply unsatisfactory to my already fighty-for-justice heart and mind. I didn’t know what they looked like, but I knew there were more tools on this earth than just carrots and sticks. I knew war was an answer, sure, but it wasn’t the only answer. The world was just way too big and complicated for that to be true.
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