Some People Can't Be Helped
The first rule of getting your ox out of a ditch is not to get back in the same ditch tomorrow.
Sometimes I wish I was somebody else.
Someone who was less angry and more forgiving.
Someone who doesn’t know the past and can live in the present.
Someone who has control over his emotions.
But I’m not that someone.
I’m just me.
I care.
I do get so tired of being accused of not caring about my fellow man – and as a classical liberal with libertarian leanings, I get that a lot, but it isn’t that I don’t care, I just have no patience for people who aren’t willing to do the things I have done to achieve the things I have.
I’ve lived a life of independence and hard work to get to where I am. Some are familiar with my story of growing up poor in rural north Mississippi, a child of hard-working, God-fearing parents and part of my mother’s extended family, the grandchild of grandparents I honor and revere to this day.
When you grow up poor, you come to appreciate the simple things and you treasure everything you earn – whether it is money, praise, or status. The blood, sweat and tears these things cost cause them to have special meaning, these are more than trophies or totems, they are the building blocks of who we are.
When I was growing up, we were trained not to waste a single thing. I can remember how my grandmother recycled every scrap of cloth, saving up enough to piece them together into beautiful quilts. What people with money saw as something to discard, she saw as something that would be useful…and beautiful. Her hand stitching was as perfect as the fot-powered Singer machine she often used. I can still recognize her work by its characteristic exactness, and the hand embroidery work in which she was so skilled. Tucked away in storage is a pillowcase she made for me as a child. It has little blue bunnies on it. It is wrapped around a piece of paper on which, in her own hand, is written a prayer we said together when I was five years old.
She gave many of these works of art to families who had less than our families did. Through acts of kindness like this, I was taught kindness and Christian charity.
It is in my nature to also abhor waste and frivolous, cavalier attitudes toward money and wealth.
I think it is human nature to be charitable - at least most people I know are of that natural bent. They are good people, all of whom would certainly pull Samaritan like duty if they saw you beaten and lying in a ditch but like me, they have witnessed a lot of people in the ditch who have spit at us as we pulled them out and set their feet on the path. We have also grown tired of seeing that same person in the same ditch two days later as we travel by, lying there cursing us because we are smart enough to avoid being in the ditch with them – again.
I do not begrudge anyone truly in need of my charity. I will give of my time, my talents, and my treasure to help them - but where I draw the line is when my charity is expected, abused and taken for granted – demanded, even - and therein lies my problem with governmental programs designed to hand out my hard-earned tax dollars to those not in true need.
Welfare should be about ensuring survival, not guaranteeing a certain standard of living – but that is what it has become in America. It is even used as bait to attract illegal aliens to be snared and used for political leverage.
In my lexicon, there are two kinds of poverty – absolute and relative.
Absolute poverty is simply defined as a daily battle for survival – I liken this to the poverty in the slums of New Delhi or the outskirts of Bangkok where people live in leaky, one room tin shacks and survive on a bowl of rice a day. Relative poverty is what we have in the US, where poverty is measured as a percentage of the income level – this allows us to classify people who possess items that are not essential to survival (i.e., mobile phones, TV’s, cars and PlayStations) as “poor”. This is not true poverty. Efforts to “alleviate” relative poverty are nothing more than attempts to provide a certain guaranteed standard of living, not to assure survival.
The solution to absolute poverty is an educated (not indoctrinated) citizenry possessing real and valuable skills and in a growing, expanding capitalist economy, not government handouts. There is no solution to relative poverty because as the national income rises, so does the “poverty line”.
Absolute poverty does not exist in America – and relative poverty is not an issue except when it is used by populists and “progressives” to justify class envy in pursuit of a collectivist state.
Attempts to spend our way out of relative poverty is but an exercise in wealth redistribution that turns to waste.
The simple fact is that there are people who need help – but they are being obscured by people who can’t be helped, don’t want to be helped, simply don’t deserve help, and will even curse you for not helping them more.
Both of my parents were like yours, except from Arkansas. I am thankful that I came from such stock. They must be weeping up in heaven as they look down on the mess made in our land.
Michael, you might be interested to know that your name is being put forward in the FB group Fans of BOTW to run for Senate! I'm for it, of course! Or governor since we need to get rid of Cox.