I recently asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day.
Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?’
She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.’
Her parents beamed.
‘Wow…what a worthy goal.’ I told her, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.’
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?’
Homeless does not mean helpless. I remember a story in the Providence Journal a few years back, around the time I used to work in Providence. There was a man who stood at a very busy highway entrance ramp most days with a sign “Will work for food”. Thousands of commuters and others, including me, saw him all the time. A reporter offered to set him up with a job. Several times. The man never showed up for the jobs. But he did show up at the ramp.
This is a story familiar to any social worker who deals with the homeless. It doesn’t account for all the homeless. But it accounts for some.
On a related but different subject - there was a man at the bar where I work two nights ago who asked me if I was hiring. When I said no, he said “great”. He just needed a signature for his unemployment card. Nothing like the first time I’ve seen this one.
This in no way indicts all the unemployed, or even most of them. But it’s a true story, nonetheless.
“People with disabilities who are unable to work and must rely on entitlements such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) can find it virtually impossible to find affordable housing. In 2000, the federal SSI benefit was $512 per month, which would not cover the cost of an efficiency or one-bedroom apartment in any major housing market in the country.”
It’s sort of a way of saying, not all homeless people are lazy bastards who should go out and live the American dream. Ideology notwithstanding, the truth usually comes in shades of gray. Oh, the source : mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/publicat … elessness/
Personally I just find the OP unbearably patronising, and it obviously comes from someone ignorant about the homeless and looking for an easy target. Pretty low even by “Republican” email standards which are lets face it, not scraping the barrel but buried somewhere deep beneath it. This type of mindless bilge water can’t reflect well on the Republican party, surely?
I don’t think it was ignorant at all. Surely no more ignorant than those who are ignorant of the fact that some homeless people are so by choice.
Anyone remember that famous panhandler in the Haight who had a house, a wife and kids? Made a middle class living. He was just good at it, and enjoyed the “work”. I’ll try to find that somewhere.
Rejecting it out-of-hand is mindless. Like all humor, there is some truth to it.
You have never known a homeless person who was so by choice?
I’m sure there are people who are homeless and bone idle and could if they so wished get a job. The same can be said for any group of people though, they are at least in a position to defend themselves. It’s a sitting duck target.
Generalisations are lazy. I expect more sophisticated propaganda in politics. Who is this targeted at, political hermits? Bigots who are used to generalising entire sections of society in lieu of anything intelligent to say? Dorito munching simpletons?
By the by, the easy counter to this is, “I don’t want to give him all the money, but I’ll keep $45 and pay him $5.” My father-in-law tried to do this to me in college. “Let’s say you have an ‘A’ in physics and your buddy has a ‘C’. Would you give him some of your grade so you both got ‘Bs’?” “Nope, but if I had more than I needed for an ‘A’, and he had a good reason for having a ‘C’, I’d give him what I didn’t need so he could get a ‘B’'.”
Fox News is a misnomer though. It’s Fox opinion often stated as news, telling you what to think how to think and when. Politics tends to denote that there is more than one party in the country. News in theory gives the facts in a way that leaves it open to your own interpretation, no one could mistake Fox for news in that case, it’s more like our tabloid journalism, like the Daily Mail and such.
