‘Worth’ is a word that we read and hear daily. It derives from Middle English ‘weorp,’ according to etymology online. As an adjective it held meanings of having value, honorable, deserving, noble, of high rank. As a noun, it had connotations of value given a commodity, associated with a monetary value, equivalent value. As a verb not much used today, had a meaning of coming into being.
With the prefix ‘un’ worth becomes a negative, the opposite of deserving, dishonorable, ignoble, of no value. Worthy and unworthy swirl around America’s political discourse on government social and economic assistance programs like pike hunting minnows in reeds. Mostly unspoken, but the connotations of worthy and unworthy are there in plain sight. Some folks are worthy beneficiaries’ others not. A farmer having a loan cancelled through a Department of Agriculture farm assistance program is considered a worthy beneficiary, but a poor kid with a college student loan is somehow unworthy of debt forgiveness.
I recall watching a recent question and answer exchange at a town hall meeting where Iowa Senator Grassely asked participants whether “abled bodied’’ folks should receive Medicaid. Folks in the crowd nodded in agreement. Instead of directly answering a question about proposed broad cuts to Medicaid, to the tune of $800 billion, he tossed out the lure of unworthiness and reeled them in. He flipped the question of broad, sweeping cuts to one about unworthy beneficiaries. In the process he avoided the fact that the majority of those who receive Medicaid benefits are kids, working single moms with kids.
Nowhere in the national discourse about government safety net benefits is the discussion of why so many hard-working folks in this country need a Medicaid program to begin with. Republicans don’t want us to point to decades of stagnating or shrinking wages, little to no medical insurance benefits, the destruction of unions, women being systematically underpaid than their male counterparts, or the link between for-profit hospital and health insurance systems and disappearing rural hospitals. Instead, like a trickster’s shell game, politicians roll out the time-honored trope of unworthiness: It’s those damn able-bodied cheaters and thieves.
This is not new. America has a long history of denigrating and stigmatizing the poor. Lazy, immoral, drunks, dangerous. Unworthy. Even our public school system has 19th century roots in philanthropic endeavors to get poor kids into schools and away from their drunken and lazy parents and instill in them discipline, a work ethic for the factory system.
This dichotomy between worthy and unworthy permeates other areas of our culture and society. COVID is an example of how some made worthy/unworthy arguments about how to respond to the pandemic. To many, the elderly (no longer economically useful) or folks with comorbidities (mostly overweight or diabetic), were not worthy of protecting.
Worthy and unworthy is also central to how we treat migrants. Black Africans wanting asylum are told to ‘go away, no room at the inn.’ White South Africans, ‘welcome, come on in.’ Trump is particularly successful at stigmatizing and criminalizing migrants: “Rapists and murders,” “emptying out their asylums,” “The worst of the worst,” “they’re eating our pets.” The characterization of migrants as unworthy opens the door for his administration to pursue illegal and devastating actions against targeted migrants, such as invoking war time acts to detain and deport without due process or the Writ of Habeas Corpus. The prison that hundreds were sent to in El Salvador is a one-way ticket. An El Salvadoran minister bragged that the only way one leaves the prison is in a coffin. According to polls, many Americans thought it okay, to my discomfort.
If one pauses to look and think, one can see that ‘who is worthy’ and ‘who is unworthy’ all too often shapes our beliefs and actions. Far too often, how we treat foreign visitors, migrants, the elderly, the poor, the sick, the other, depends on whether we consider them worthy or unworthy of human dignity and respect.
