its years of talk radio like Limbaugh and friends and the old "people eat better on food stamps than I do " in fact I remember in the mid 90s Limbaugh had a 20 minute spiel (it was in the news apparently) on this town that went all out to help this homeless with kids family with a house jobs food ect and it lasted 6 months or so
How it ended is the family wandered off one night because dad didn’t like staying in anyone place too long and supposedly didn’t like working but they left a nice thank you note on the door …
rushes moral was well they wont appreciate or waste it in with a lot of don’t help the homeless reasons
The underlying belief is Life Is Fair. This universe is ruled by a Just And Loving God, who wouldn’t have it any other way.
(You can see other examples of this in the Law Of Attraction, also known as the Power Of Prayer or Name It And Claim It. It all comes to the same thing: If you Truly Believe, and do it hard enough, you will get what you truly deserve. If you don’t Truly Believe, well, scum like you are going to Hell anyway, so charity would be wasted.)
Therefore, People Get What’s Coming To Them.
Therefore, Poor People Are Scum, because you’d have to be scum to deserve to be poor.
Therefore, helping the poor means giving to the unworthy.
Yeah, unfortunately that’s what a lot of people believe. Load of crap.
“All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
**YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
**
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
That’s exactly right, and it’s why I’m an Existentialist.
The underlying concept of Existentialism is that Existence Precedes Essence. That means the Universe is here, it was here long before us, and it isn’t dependent on us to exist. The Universe simply is, without a meaning of its own, without a ‘because’ or, indeed, a Cause in the teleological sense.
Humans can’t simply drift aimlessly in free space the way hunks of hydrogen ice can, however, so we have to impose a meaning on what happens. We do this because we are human. Existentialism says that we’re free to impose any meaning we want, and nobody ‘higher’ than us can tell us we’re wrong. Therefore, we can create the meanings we need to have in order to live better, to have the best lives we can as constrained by physical law.
You guys are looking at this the wrong way. That $50 could have been considered a micro-loan, and with that person’s ready access to a pool of cheap labor, it could have been the beginning of a small business.
There’s an old saying that is appropriate here: * Give a man a pizza, and he eats for a day. Teach a man how to exploit his fellow undocumented immigrants for their cheap labor in order to make pizzas, and he eats for a lifetime.*
You know, they might have ordered a lot of food so they could make it last for more than one meal. Pizza and wings usually taste pretty good without reheating. I sometimes order a large pizza and a couple of orders of wings — and I get 4-6 meals out of it.
If they went back the next they would have to pay for another cab ride. This is a better way to do that.
.
Like I said in the other thread, now that I have noticed this one, they got THREE LARGE PIZZAS FOR $5 EACH. (Or, okay, we know at least two of the pizzas were $5 each, maybe the ham and cheese pizza was $10 for all I know. Still.) And some fries and wings. And they probably had about $10-$20 leftover. And this was to feed her family and it sounds like at least one other person. This is not like some fucking wasteful splurge. It’s five dollar pizzas. I can’t even make a large pizza for five dollars!
If they spent a month traveling and only ate twice a day they might have a lost a little weight along the way. They might have felt a little full, but I don’t they had problems.
I, too, get tired of judgmental assholes second-guessing the decisions of the poor and/or desperate.
people can live 60-70 years on the terrible “standard american diet.” All those guys my dad’s age who are suffering the effects of it (central obesity, T2D, etc.) took decades to get that way. Not because their mom bought them pizza one day.
cripes. Our bodies are amazingly adaptable and tolerant of a wide range of food intake. you’re not going to have a heart attack and die just because you ate one too many pieces of pizza one day and forgot to eat some kale with it.
A couple years back, following IIRC a riot in Ferguson, MO, a mom was on the radio, saying her kids were crying because the Little Caesar’s had been burnt down. A $5 pizza was their special Friday treat because it was what she could afford. Broke my heart to listen to her.
The stupid thing about the blankets is that they were “begging” for them from the volunteer center. Because they were out all night in line. Presumably they collect the blankets again in the morning for the next batch of people so all this woman was doing was asking if they had an extra blanket or two for the night. The OP makes it sound like she’s begging for blankets to own because she refused to buy them with her precious pizza money.
