Being fired from your job suddenly despite not having done anything wrong can be devastating to one’s personal finances, let alone one’s sense of self. But when the people you know among your family and friends celebrate your loss, that makes it much, much worse. But that is what seems to be happening.
Scrambling to replace their health insurance and to find new work, some laid-off federal workers are running into another unexpected unpleasantry: Relatives cheering their firing.
…Expecting sympathy, some axed workers are finding family and friends who instead are steadfast in their support of what they see as a bloated government’s waste.
“I’ve been treated as a public enemy by the government and now it’s bleeding into my own family,” says 24-year-old Luke Tobin, who was fired last month from his job as a technician with the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest.
Tobin’s job loss sent him scurrying to fill prescriptions before he lost his health insurance and filling out dozens of applications to find whatever work he can, even if it’s at a fast-food restaurant. But some relatives reacting to his firing as “what has to happen to make the government great again” has been one of the worst parts of the entire ordeal.
…Kristin Jenn got a similar response from members of her family after she learned the National Park Service ranger job she was due to start had been put on hold by the DOGE hiring freeze. She thinks it’s likely the job will be eliminated altogether.
As she has expressed her disappointment over potentially losing her dream job, some members of her mostly conservative family have unfriended her on social media. Others are giving her the silent treatment. Nearly all favor such cuts even if she’s a victim of them.
…Eric Anderson, 48, of Chicago, was still absorbing the shock of being fired from his National Park Service job as a biological science technician when he came across his aunt’s social media post celebrating the DOGE cuts. The gist, Anderson said, was, “Man, it sure is great seeing all this waste being knocked off.”
He grows angry thinking about it.
…Social media is teeming with posts reveling the layoffs and urging DOGE: “Fire more!” In a fiercely divided country, many saw the cutbacks through their own political lens.
One man’s devastation, it turns out, can be another man’s delight.
You can read more such stories at the link.
I can understand if you are so politically committed that you think that even people in your family deserve to lose their jobs just to fulfill some ideological imperative. But surely you can still react with empathy at the plight of a fellow human? People who delight in such things are sociopaths.
those people were surely already inundated with anecdotes of “lib” family members ostracizing them or laughing when they die of covid, and could see this as revenge, i suppose. nazi-ass creeps gotta get fucking shoved back in the trash can tho. i like to nod to the other side of an issue before chucking it out the window.
In all the time people have been conditioned to hate “bureaucrats” and think of all government workers as “waste, fraud and abuse,” did any of them even ask, or show any interest, in what their government-employed relatives did?
When I read your title, I was expecting something very different, namely people who voted for DT and then found themselves victims of the firing spree. There is a subreddit (Leopards Ate My Face) where you can find numerous stories like this.
Sounds like, for some, it’s easier to blank and ghost the family member than it is to recognise that someone they know is suffering real hardship and that they played a role in it.
That’s not sociopathy. That’s being a narrow-minded selfish bigoted arsehole. Distressing for the victim to realise that, after all, these others never were “family” members except when it suited their personal individual interests.
@1: interesting, I hadn’t thought about a catch-Covid-and-die connection with people’s relatives celebrating their being fired. You may well be onto something.
In the vein of people celebrating causing harm to others, The Friendly Atheist has a post up about Christian schools in the Dallas area--and one school in particular--celebrating their anti-vax status *during a measles outbreak that’s already killed people*. That’s right, they’re so pro-life that they’re not content to kill their own children, they want to kill *everyone’s* children (and elderly, and immune-compromised, and anyone for whom that particular vax just doesn’t mount the appropriate immune response). Read the link: this particular school threw a party and had t-shirts made to celebrate their death cult.
Link: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/amid-measles-outbreak-christian-school?r=yngw6
@1: agreed, interesting point. Not that I think these fuckwits needed any excuse to be scum, but you’re right -- there may well have been some libs in their family assaulting them with facts and data and all that stuff, so I can see why they might be even more inclined than before to celebrate owning said libs.
You will never defeat these people until you understand that they are NOT LIKE YOU. They have been indoctrinated to view empathy as weakness. In this they have the mentality of a toddler, as was evident from both the Deputy President AND Vice President at the White House meeting with Zelenskyy (presumably the President was off arranging one of his rocket launches or something).
What we must learn is that while we may be unable to prevent ourselves from having empathy with them, they will NEVER experience it for anyone else. Proceed on that basis, and you’ll be less often disappointed.
I dont know -- I find my levels of empathy for the other side going lower every day. If Musk(or really any Trump enabler or Trump himself) was hit by a cyber truck and was lying on the side of the road , would I call 911 / try to help ? The answer is still yes but the amount of time needed to come to that yes increases every day,
@Bébé Mélange @1
My recollection is that this type of deep family divisions started off during the Tea Party days where the level of hatred being spewed caused atleast some people to break with what other family members were saying /doing. You be accurate that this is their revenge (till them themselves lose their jobs)
They say that you will know who your true friends are when you find yourself in adversity, and unfortunately… they did. Pity they had to find out this way.
As for adversity, don’t worry: there’s plenty more coming. Just wait for the wailing when those gloating today find themselves on the chopping block tomorrow.
So many leopards, so many faces.
I have been thinking about this post quite a bit since I saw it (Saturday morning, probably). How did we get to where people are so mean? Because I have personally seen people be more openly hostile than ever before.
Could some of this be due to Internet behavior? It was being observed well over a decade ago that people would be cruel on the Internet where they had anonymity, but wouldn’t necessarily be cruel in person. Perhaps because doing so violated social norms. But has being cruel on the Internet become such a norm that it has invaded in-person interactions and people no longer need anonymity to engage in bad behavior?
And, referring to comment #1, perhaps COVID helped accelerate this? There were no social norms for how to deal with a pandemic and so people applied their bad Internet behavior to the situation?
I would be curious if there has been much recent study into this. I have doubts that there will be in the future because it is probably the sort of study that will be difficult to get funding for. 🫤
How did we get to where people are so mean?
One major factor is lack of decent coherent leadership, on either side. When people don’t have that, we get fearful; and when we don’t have a plan for the common good that everyone (or at least a comfy majority) can see each other following, then each of us sees no other option but to get theirs and cheer for the side that appears to be “winning.”