There is on the left a peculiar blindness which in a way speaks very well of the people who have it, in another speaks very badly indeed, and in other ways makes you wonder if they're aliens.
When faced with anything from disease to poverty to homelessness, they always come up with material causes. From the bizarre idea of the "Bee sting" that if you are poor you run into so many frustrating things that you can't do anything to help yourself, to their very strange idea that poverty causes crimes and wars.
So, we end up with them being very sorry for robbers and murderers because they couldn't help but do what they did, since they were so poor. This always makes me think of the once upon a time friend who was kidnapped at gun point in a grocery store and taken from ATM to ATM to empty his account and give the money to his kidnapper, but who ended this account with "I'm blessed that I'm not so poor I have to do that."
If your jaw just dropped, mine did.
We have been poor -- not right, now so much, because the kids are moving on to their own thing -- and -- when older son was tiny -- poor enough that we didn't know where food would come from. (Literally. We missed some meals. We sat outside a soup kitchen, but didn't have the courage to go in. So next money we had we bought 50lbs of rice, and lived on that, more or less.) I have to say NEVER in the history of EVER have we felt we should steal money from.... anyone really.
Look, the part about the left that means they're better than we'd expect, as people, is that they think it takes extraordinary circumstances for people to be lazy or larcenous enough to be "poor" (Poor now isn't poor in, say, the middle ages, or even the early 20th century), they think it takes extraordinary circumstances for anyone to commit a crime (which means evil people wouldn't exist), so they themselves must be relatively decent, self motivating, hard working people. On the other hand they're probably envious, and view coveting someone else's stuff or situation as reason enough to steal or hurt others. Or at least they view it as reason enough for other people.
The part where they are aliens? They seriously seem to think it's all material.
"People are poor. If we give them money, they'll be better off." This when speaking as to the rest of human history, our poor are living better than the upper middle class of other eras, and might be living better than kings. (No? Well. Availability of food at relatively cheap prices; modern medicine -- yes, ER but you know, it ends being more or less free --; heating in winter, cooling in summer; in the west relative peace and security.)
It is entirely possible the reason we have so many poor is that they already have too much and are too comfortable -- as in they are getting what the monkey-brain, which was trained for the paleolithic identifies as "More than enough." So, no they won't do extraordinary work/effort. Because, well, no motivation. (Even for those of us who are broken and HAVE to do something sometimes it's hard to make the effort.) In many ways the issues of poverty on the welfare system is children, living in their parents basement, because they haven't been kicked out to sink or swim on their own.
In the same way, the left looks at homelessness and decides the problem is that there aren't enough houses. This, btw, requires refusing to see that subsidized housing developments quickly become hell on Earth or that with few exceptions, the "homeless" are an interesting collection of addictions and mental illness, which is the real cause of their plight, and not some imaginary lack of "housing." Which is why the left keeps building more and more subsidized housing, and the problem grows instead of shrinking.
This requires being aliens who have never met a human being.
Me? Personally I resent the "poor equals crime and war" thing the most. Because, you know what? The village was d*mn poor. We didn't realize it, because everyone was poor. But you know what? Most of us were 'poor but honest'. And you could, as a little kid, walk down main street in the dark of night, even carrying something relatively valuable, like food and clothing, and not be scared, let alone attacked.
It is insulting to all the people I knew in childhood -- all that weren't the one family who stole clothes from other people's lines, and chickens from their hen houses -- to believe that they "couldn't help" but be thieves and murderers or even whores. Because none of that was true. Most people lived "tiny" lives, very restricted and carefully counted that they earned by the sweat of their brow. And they would have been furious if you called them poor, let alone criminals. They were also, always ready to hand over bread and butter to someone in need, even if they couldn't afford to give an egg or a piece of meat (but that too, when they could.)
In fact, many times, the equation goes the other way. Someone decides he or she is too smart to work, and starts trying to make a living in shady ways. It's not that crime doesn't pay. It's that like communism -- who, now I think about it is also criminal -- it only pays for a select few, at the top. The others? yeah, they barely manage a living, and often fall into addiction and other issues. And once you fall into crooked habits, it's very difficult to pull up out of it and into "honest work" again, particularly if everyone assumes the bourgeois virtues are evil-bad and being criminal means you're a victim.
So.... you know, this is how the left has rats in their head, and keep trying the same thing, now harder, when it doesn't work.
I hated being poor, and I don't know anyone who loves it. It hurts the rest of us to watch, particularly for children or other innocent victims.
But, as with the kid in the basement, at some point you have to wonder if you hurt the poor and criminal (as a class) and even the just poor on welfare by making the ride too cushy and being so incredibly compassionate that we let the public purse be extravagantly drained (Now for illegal entrants into the country) and let communities -- we're looking at you, NYC -- live in fear.
Because as someone or other said, to be kind to the cruel you always end up being cruel to the kind.
The few people who live in public housing because of genuine issues and disabilities get their lives turned into hell by criminals and drug addicts and barely human feral creatures.
And those who live in cities where our compassion just turns criminals loose live in fear or die needlessly because of that "compassion."
And people who could otherwise start at the bottom and learn skills and become valuable members of society and rich even maybe, never get started because of the false compassion of our welfare which not only gives them the "minimum" but makes it hard to leave and strive.
People are people, and the poor and even the criminal have agency.
Let's stop enabling and start demanding they act as human beings capable of thought and action.
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