I was thinking this morning of when I first became class conscious.
For several weeks I volunteered to serve meals to people experiencing homelessness. Afterwards, I volunteered at a charity dinner soliciting donations from wealthy patrons where the level of opulence and disconnect was staggering to me.
The dinner was hosted at a private estate where they owned more than a dozen cars and 5 houses for a family of 7. This was fewer than 5 miles outside of a city with overflowing shelters and people freezing to death. Here was all the wealth needed to provide homes to every person presently surviving in a shelter, and it was squandered in the hands of people entirely detached and unaware of the scope of the problem. In their minds, through petty charity they could live with a clean conscious believing they’d done their part.
The egregiousness of the disparity, the obliviousness of our guests, and their astonishing reluctance to donate left me furious for days. My own hypocrisy left me feeling crushed and crumpled inside for much longer.
I think you make a valid point, I have seen people in the same situation, they legitimately don’t want to change their situation and it is true that if you give them money It will probably by used for nonsense but I think that homeless people or poor people in general dont necessarily want to be poor, it’s not like they wake up one day and say: “You know what’d be great, have no money and beg for food in the streets”, I think it’s a matter of luck, I for example was lucky enough to have a good education and make something out of it, but there are people who are born in the streets and of course they think there’s no way out of it, nobody taught them otherwise.