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Whether charity is to come from the individual or the state, I repeat that it is not necessary to regard a person as "entitled" in order to help that person.
I assure you that I am not affluent by any means. I am a 38 year old college dropout who has worked every sh#it job known to man, and only within the last few years have I been able to purchase a modest dwelling which I can afford without the benefit of roommates. So none need talk to me about being "affluent in comparison to the needy", "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps", "copping out", "trickle down", or "the right side of the tracks."
I have been there, my friend. I have walked up and down the street in Chicago knocking on every door, looking for a job, and when I was handed an apron, I immediately put it on without complaint. I've washed dishes and bussed tables. I've mopped the floors after hours and dumped garbage cans full of half eaten, rotting food. I've worked day labor cleaning construction sites and tearing garbage out of burned-out buildings. I've hauled large pieces of furniture in and out and up and down a thousand dwellings and flats. And I am not talking about engaging in this type of work for a year or two of my life.
I've lived in a basement and slept on the floor and done my bathing in a wash-basin, in a building where I stripped and refinished doors for a minister of the Unitarian Church. And in a building with the back burned off, where I shared a bathroom with 4 families who did not speak English. Where rats would bail out of the garbage bags in the hall one by one as you left your room, and go loping down the hallway like small, fat alley cats. I've tried to knock them out from under my bed with a stick as they clung upside down to the springs and glared at me with defiant eyes, so that I would not awake in the night to find them sniffing my breath. And above a gay bar where the disco music pounded until two o'clock in the morning, and the bartenders started dumping garbage cans filled with beer bottles into the dumpsters in the alley beneath my window at 4:00 am. And in a room on the second floor where my window looked out upon a major North Side bus terminal, where buses, street sweepers, and front-end loaders rolled ceaselessly in and out 24 hours a day. Where we scrounged the alleyways during a Chicago winter, looking for pallets which we hauled up to our flat and busted apart on the floor before throwing them into the fireplace, and where the fleas feasted upon our ankles and shins when we awoke in the night to visit the bathroom.
I mention this only to show you that I have an idea what poverty is. Nobody forced me to live that way and I never asked anyone for a handout. It doesn't make me right, but I think I have a grasp of the concepts involved in our discussion.
I repeat again that it is not necessary to grant an "entitlement" in order to help a person in need. And once again that this assumes that someone else has acquired an obligation upon their labor, that is, their life, without their consent. I don't consider this a "sophistication". I consider it an absolute underlying reality, one which you have deliberately avoided addressing.
And I consider it a reality and a practice which turns the whole idea of justice upon its head, and one that brings out the absolute worst in human behavior. That is, it encourages one man, through his behavior, to make of himself a slave, while at the same time labeling another man a criminal. It is under penalty of force and imprisonment that we are complicit in our own destruction.
We often take our circumstances, our surroundings, and our system of govt and its practices for granted, that is, without questioning them. And many of the public are prone to take the implementation of policy at its face value, without questioning its efficacy, or the intent of those who espouse it. I don't take the system at face value and turn my face from the problem saying, "well, it's designed to take care of the poor, and the needy."
It's a system that is degrading and dehumanizing to both parties in the transaction, and that is why it has failed so utterly and completely. And one of the reasons that it is perpetuated is because by saying, "it's designed to take care of the poor" we are enabled to turn our backs upon the problem and walk away as if it no longer existed, while in practice we have condemned the "beneficiaries" to a life of crime and deprivation. I can give no better proof of this assertion than simply to point to some of the current conditions in American society, and to the levels of crime, and to the communities in which these abhorrent conditions are concentrated. And they are precisely the communities that have been the subject of $trillions$ of dollars of our generous "welfare" and overweening beneficence. Reality leaves little doubt that we have succeeded in making conditions immeasurably worse. Yes, we tore down the ghettos and herded many of the inhabitants into "compounds" in which they may remain dependant upon upon us for their "welfare" for generations. Where they may never learn what it means to get a job, to value an education, or to take personal responsibility for their lives, their actions, or even for their own children.
What began from a consensus that something must be done to relieve human suffering has evolved into a system that absolutely ensures it, one which is designed to appeal to the worst in human nature, and that is encouraged and perpetuated for the sake of acquiring political power.
And it is precisely because we are accused of being criminals, by those who perpetuate the system that we turn our backs and walk away. |
