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Home » Diets that Work » No Fennel in the Sausage, No $600 for the Jobless – CounterPunch

We can find one revealing answer in the darkest days of the 17th century. In 1629, the British historian Erin Maglaque noted recently, a fearsome plague swept into Italy. In Florence, officials in the local health board tried to cordon off their city, but the disease slipped in anyway.

By August 1630 Florence was burying its dead by the hundreds in broad and deep pits. By the following January, the city had ordered citizens locked in their homes for a 40-day quarantine and then gone about the business of delivering food to the tens of thousands of locked-down households.

The food the Florentine health board had delivered would be exceptionally varied and fine: bread and wine, sausage seasoned with fennel and rosemary, rice and cheese, salads of sweet and bitter herbs. The health board, historian Maglaque tells us, considered the citys enormous outlay for good food a necessary expense. The poor of Florence had been living, city health officials realized, on diets that left them especially vulnerable to infection.

Improving the well-being of the poor, the Florentine health board believed, would be a key to the citys recovery. But this idea of feeding the poor at a high-quality level appalled many of the citys wealthy. They worried, one observer would later write, that the quarantine would give the poor of Florence the opportunity to be lazy and lose the desire to work, having for forty days been provided abundantly for all theirneeds.

Other Italian cities rejected the Florentine health board lead. They refused to provide abundantly for the needs of their poor and paid a price. In Florence, the plague ended with 12 percent of the population dead. In Venice, the death rate ran nearly three times the Florentine rate, in Milan almost four times.

Today, nearly four centuries later, Senator Lindsey Graham and his Republican Senate colleagues are marching right in the footsteps of those 17th-century Italians who found the prospect of anything close to abundance for the poor so scandalous.

This bill pays you more not to work than if you were working, Graham harrumphedbefore the Senate vote on his benefit-cutback amendment to the corona relief legislation.

What connects our affluent today to the wealthy elites of old Italy? The unnerving impact of inequality on the psyches of the privileged. The more wealth the wealthy of any epoch accumulate, the less they value those without wealth.

In deeply unequal societies, those who hold grand private fortunes must sooner or later come to grips with the vast gap that separates them from everyone else. Why do I have so much, becomes the unspoken question, while so many have so little?

The easiest answer: I must deserve my good fortune. I must be worthy. And if I owe my good fortune to my worthiness, then those without fortune must owe their sad circumstances to their unworthiness. They must be dumb or lazy or profligate or worse. These undesirables, this perspective plays out, do not deserve our generosity. Any generosity toward them would only open up, as Lindsey Graham puts it, a Pandoras box.

So assumed the rich of Florence so many generations ago. So assume their counterparts today. Then as now, that amounts to a deadly assumption.

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No Fennel in the Sausage, No $600 for the Jobless - CounterPunch

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Home » Diets that Work » No Fennel in the Sausage, No $600 for the Jobless – CounterPunch