Those Pesky Poor People

If there is one thing I do not find offense when I get called a name... it is "bleeding heart liberal."  I do not truly know when it became a weakness or a bad thing to care about those less fortunate than myself, but if it does place a negative mark on me, so be it.  I would rather be that than one who disregards those who suffer, or one who tries to stigmatize the poor to make themselves feel better when they do not care about them...

For class recently I've read books that address the poor in the nation, not just on a racial scale and not simply in our time period... but from the 16th and 17th century in England where many believed that the poor should be institutionalized or shipped off to another place and made to do hard labor because for whatever reason... they did not make enough to be successful.

While I do not attend church every Sunday and I do not believe that one needs any form of religion to be compassionate or caring... it does pretty much say, very clearly in the bible to take care of the poor, to not ridicule the poor, and to treat them with the love you would want to be treated with in return... and yet in America... well... we don't do that do we?


When a Conservative analyst today on television said that food programs being cut due to government shutdown wasn't the end of the world...he obviously did not think about all the kids who rely on those programs to get fed every single day.  Because he does not care.

Just like the English rich didn't care if the poor starved, or died, or whatever... they just didnt want the blight in front of them or to look at the reasons WHY the people were poor in the first place....

lazy, idle, brutish even...those were the words used to describe a people displaced during a huge population boom that resulted in the scarcity of jobs available to them to work and feed their families....

and today.... have we looked at the poor, or are we too fixed on the fact that you may see a woman with her nails painted and owning a cell phone in a grocery store line buying food with food stamps...because that is the excuse...

there is always an excuse to turn our eyes away and feeling ok about being callous.  

But it really is not ok.

What about those kids....what about the old and infirm...what about the disabled.... what about the mom working two jobs at minimum wage and cannot afford to get a third because she might lose the small amount of benefits she gets....

what about the people who've lived in poverty all their lives and know nothing else....who go to schools that are underfunded and are sent to high school dropout factories that just rotate them back out into the minimum wage working world where they get screamed at if they do not facilitate someone's burger order perfectly every single time...

I dont pretend to even know what that is like, nor do I want to to know... but if a few of my tax dollars goes to help those people...GOOD.  I wish we could do more, I wish we weren't so jaded and automatically angry, and so insightful about every single poor person's life that we just KNOW they are lazy and abusing the system.

Really really bothers me...