On Being in Need in America

On the comment section of the last entry we see one of the guilding principles of American culture; those who work hard suceed, and if you don't succeed it's because you don't derve to becasue you didn't work hard.That's our glorious Calvinist heritage, which is so deeply implanted that even non Calvinists agree with it. To Bomeless in America means that one is faceless, undeserving, an non person. We rationalize the fact that we let millions of people lose everything they have and wander the streets until they die in a schocking category of non-human, former people who have lost even the right to be pitted, because they are just too power and reminders of our guilt not to ourselves things like "well if they had worked hard God would have rewarded them."

I don't blame people for wanting to hang on their little middle class heavens. I've been living in the remignts of the little middle class heaven my parents created, since I moved in to take care of them full time (which of coruse I didn't work hard for three years of total self deniel where I didn't even leave the house so I could keep my Alzheimer's mother from wondering off--but that's hard work, that's just vacation--hard work is where you get a job that your cronie from college puts you on to and you join the country club and play Golf on thusdays).

Most people are only a couple of pay checks away from being homeless themselves. They know this instinctively, that's why anything over 20 buck would just cause their lives to crubmle. I don't blame them. I really don't. There are others who move into big houses and dirve Bentlies and when you ask for help they say "we don't have it, we just tie all our money up in our five hundred thousand dollar home and so of cousre we can't help you." But that's really because we dont' deserve help. By the time we are lowley enought to need help we have sinned and God is treating our sloth as it deserves by letting us die in the gutter. But hard working people never go homeless. So when we see these nameles, faceless former people we can just turn our mental eyes away and not think about them in good conscience, knowing that they didn't work hard.

The thing I resent the most is that I will have my mind taken away from me. I'm sure a lot of peole thnk that will be an improvement, but I like being able to think about useless abstract things. I like marking my failure and the useless nature of my life with this kind of thinking. When I was in seminary we went to help out at a soup kitchen. They told us there that after six months on the street people go insane and even if they are rescued after that, they are never the same again. They never get their minds back. I really resent that the most. But after all ademic work is not hard work. It's just an excuse for lazy people to read books a lot.

We took in a homeless guy once. we found him wondering the street. He was a friend of my parents who had worked at a gas station near our house. My parents were admimate about helping him. O absolutley it's our christian duty to help him. But they didnt' realize how lazy he was. When they knew him at the gas station he seemed hard working, but it was just a ruse. he was lazy and God punished him makeing him a non-human being. So we took him in, but he really wasn't the same. He couldn't function, he would break down in tears and stroke my mother's hand and strat saying "I so sorry for what I did to you..." and blubber about things he had done to his real mother--whom I guess he thought she was. We tried to find his childiren, they didn't care. Finaly we decided we coudln't cope with it, he needed help we coudlnt' give him and the way he contstantly trapsed after my mother and begged her forgiveness for things he did to his real mother was just too unnerving.

I caled his son and told him "he goes on the stree tomarrow, if you can live with that great--he's father you dumb *******." So he came and picked him up. But we heard a couple of years latter that he died on the street six months after that. He was allowed to stay at his son's house only for Thanksgiving.

It pays to work hard. I see that now. What I regret the most is all those people financial empires are ruined because I took over 20 dollars from them. If not for that I'm sure their children, recipients of powerful empires, would have cured the ills of humanity.