Yellow Submarine #9 pt 2

I am not so naïve or so self-important as to think that my example is a universal one. But there are ways of helping, and there are ways of enabling self-destruction.

I can remember as a little kid, driving around downtown Atlanta Georgia and seeing a homeless woman. I was so moved that I begged my mother to pull into a Wendy’s so I could buy her a sandwich with my allowance (which was never much). My mom, being the type of person she is, told me to hang on to it and bought the woman a Value meal and a Frosty because, she reasoned, it was a hot day and who knew how long it would be before she’d get her next meal.

We drove back to find her, but she was gone.

So my mom and I spent the next half an hour trying to find her. When we finally did, the woman couldn’t believe it. The condition of the Frosty testified to the length of time we spent looking for her.

To this day, I don’t so much as go to a fast food place without buying an extra sandwich to give to someone.
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One year my whole family made a trip to the city of my birth to celebrate. No one ever knew what to get me for my birthday because I’ve always been to embarrassed to ask and I’ve had too many birthdays without gifts to expect anything anyway. This year was different though. I got a total of forty dollars to spend in the city I love, a princely sum indeed.

While traveling on that particular city’s public transportation system, I saw a homeless man and again I was moved. My dad told me I shouldn’t be approaching strange people in a city this large.

“But I only want to give him some money to help!”

“Oh, no, no, no. Give food and work and compassion to a homeless person, but never money. You don’t know why they’re homeless and you’d never know what they used the money for.”

“That’s ridiculous. He needs food! I always have enough to eat and this money could feed him for a week.” (week and a half in the right places)

It was obvious I wasn’t going to listen, and I resented my dad’s callousness. I gave him the thirty seven dollars I hadn’t used already and told him to buy some food with it.

Like the lady, he couldn’t believe his fortune.

We boarded the system and dropped the discussion. The thought that this man would have something to eat for at least a little while was enough to satiate me despite my father’s criticisms.

On the return trip, the man was there, just as he was beforehand save one crucial detail. He had a bottle, a large bottle of whiskey, the type that costs over thirty dollars.

I was devastated. How could he do that? Again, being just that naïve I went over to find out why…

Imagine a sixth grader approaching a homeless man, broken up into tears,” I gave you that money to buy food! Aren’t you hungry?”

He told me,” Yeah kid, but I needed a drink. Give me some more and I’ll get some this time.”

When I refused he drove me off. It reminds me of an old jewish joke:

A wealthy man gives some nice money to a beggar only to see the beggar sitting in a nice restaurants eating caviar later that day.

When the old man confronts the beggar, the beggar only replies," I like caviar but when I don't have the money I can't eat it. Now you say when I do have the money I can't eat it. So tell me, when am I to eat caviar?"
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The people that don't have any standard of living to speak of are poor in judgment, not just resources.

It usually starts with lack of education; a failure to invest in one's self. Without marketable job skills your chances are very slim of ever getting more than three dollars over minimum wage by legitimate means. Draw your own correlations.

Then comes bad money management. Eating out all the time, incurring unecessary expenses for no good reason, failure to keep up with your credit, failure to plan for future expenditures, impulse buying and keeping up with the Jones'...

Then comes self-destructive behavior. Just supporting a smoking habit will consume anywhere from one to four-thousand a year. A drug or alcohol habit will run even higher are all luxury expenditures.

On that note, there are those who simply can't or won't practice safe sex, despite the noble efforts of planned parenthood and free contraceptive devices. (seriously, they will pay for condoms, diaphragms, contraceptive agents, and even for birth control methods as sophicated as the shot)
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Are these deserving poor? Absolutely, through the exercise of incredibly poor judgement they and society as a whole suffer. The people who suffer the most though are the children and that's what really gets my goat. Am I saying that these deserving poor are bad parents? Absolutely and don't give me any 'I can't make a subjective judgement like that bullshit either."

Remember, colleges and trade schools are in business to teach, and like any business they need customers. With financial aid and fiscal and commercial incentives for universities and trade schools to provide both aid, and child care, all it takes is enough will to walk into a college administration building and fill out a FAFSA and you can get an education here.

A man in Georgia not too long ago won the powerball and was an instant millionaire. He quit his job and two years later he was bankrupt. Same thing happened to MC Hammer. Live above your means, practice bad money management and no ammount of money on earth will keep you from being poor.

I'm sorry, but if it comes between keeping a roof over your children's heads and getting that last hit, that last drink, that last carton of Marlboros, and you choose anything other than the roof, I could give two rat's asses whether you've got an addiction or not. You are a bad parent and deserve what you get. Could any of you really argue otherwise? Also, if this should prove to be a pattern of behavior, and not just a one time deal, that, to me constitutes grounds for removal of your children. I will commit all precient resources to the aid of your children. I'll even revise the RICO laws which make it difficult to adopt, overturn 'blood is thicker than money" rulings which make adoption undesireable to some couples, and fight tooth and nail for gay adoption if all of this will help you're kid get adopted by someone who will love them enough to take care of them. If your stupid conduct is harming your children, if you WILL NOT take care of your children, then I have no qualms about taking them from you. You have no right to my sympathy or my means to provide for my own children.

I dated a girl once (shocking, I know) who's cousin was single and had six kids by the age of 21. In a single parent house-hold she would've had to work full-time at 14 and a half dollars an hour to make the poverty threshhold. Again, without marketable job skills there was very little chance of that happening. Her children ended up being taken care of by her extended family or becoming wards of the state. She still collects benefits on those her family takes care of. She has another one on the way.

There is no question in my mind as to if they are deserving or not. The question now comes to what should or should not be done to help them.
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In case you didn't catch it the first time "A boy and his dog" was a bit more than loosely autobiographical and my mom just had bad money management. Don't get me wrong I love my mom to death. She can be a wonderful creative type and a hell of a lot of fun. Its just that I wouldn't cosign for her if I needed a liver transplant and she was trying to finance the surgery. The divorce, and what she did to the joint lines of credit that she and my father had out of sheer contempt for him was a major reason why for a while there my family went bankrupt and ended up living off of Ramen and animal crackers for months at a stretch. Despite that, none of it means I wouldn't help her when she needed it.

My mom is a medical transcriptionist and, as of recent years, has worked out of her home. One day, while mom and the evil step-dad were having a roe, oh-he-who-shall-not-be-named decides to send her computer for a long flight off a short balcony. Believe it or not the motherboard held up without so much as a scratch! The Hard Drive also made it, but the rest of it was toast. I ended up running her over to best buy and buying her a new computer and a hard-drive transfer with what money I had saved up for my own purposes. In this way she was able to make the transition from one computer to the next without losing a day of work and the money it brought in.

I am personally of the camp that says you need a little government and a little luck in life, but only a fool trusts either one of them. With the market economy and the shifting of industries where we maintain comparative advantage, being able to shift our focus and our abilities from a failing industry, such as steel, to a thriving industry, such as the technology or service sectors is integral to our continued leadership in the new economy. That's the subject of my next, and mercifully last post on the subject of poverty.