Arrogance
I have been shocked a number of times recently by the pure baseless arrogance of so many people. A large aspect of all of our lives is luck. We had absolutely nothing to do with our being born in the life we were given.
I was born into a white family in America.That makes life easier for me that a large majority of the world. I have never been starved for food. I was given an education on a platter.The discrimination I’ve received in my life has been annoying at most. I’d even venture to guess everyone of the people who reads this blog is pretty lucky.
Recently I’ve witnessed a couple of white males who were raised in California talk about how they don’t believe in charity, because they worked hard for what they have. Really? You did. Harder than the child in Ethiopia that fights to get enough food to live?
I don’t mean to discount the accomplishments of people. Yes you worked hard in college and worked hard to get a good job. Having college as an option is luck. How can you sit there and think that you deserve it more than someone else?
Please when any of you have children, expose them to life. Let them at the very least see that good, hard-working people struggle at no fault of their own. Ignorance and shelter from these life lessons just makes us a more selfish society.
/rant
I agree with your point as far as charity toward other geographies are concerned – Ethiopians, for example. And charity for those hit by misfortune is awesome (disaster, abuse, extreme health problems, etc), and money for research and education, and for child development. It’s good to help people hurt by the random vagaries of fate, and the others are just good investments in quality of life and the future for all.
But I’m siding with the arrogant dudes when it comes to the “career” indigents in America. Poor people? I can’t get motivated to be charitable there. In America, life really is about choices – from things as small as whether or not to pay attention in class to things as big as whether to go to college. So people have it a little easier or harder as children, but I’ll remind you that we were pretty fucking poor until middle school or so, and we lived in some not-great places.
When I drive through poor neighborhoods between our two Baton Rouge offices, while I work 12 hour days and all weekend and then go home to work and study more, and I see literally dozens of healthy people drinking and cutting up and sitting around all day, I don’t feel sorry for them. My tax dollars pay for transit and education and adult education and life coaching and all kinds of services they wouldn’t need if they’d paid attention in school, maybe made a decision every now and then that wasn’t about fun. Yeah, I resent the lazy assholes I went to school with, the people who made fun of me being a dork.
And now people want to talk about the “tragedy of poverty” and try to guilt me into feeling bad? No no no. The opportunity to be self-sufficient is there for most Americans. And for the others, the issue isn’t poverty, it’s health or disaster or something else. I feel no sympathy and no compulsion to try to make horses drink. Shit, I resent them for not finding their own damn water.
I guess, really, on some level I just think life is about trade-offs. Some people are ants, and some people are grasshoppers. But when the ants save the grasshoppers every winter, in enables grasshopperism.
/grumpy rant