On 1/14/14 11:30 AM, glen wrote:
On 01/14/2014 10:22 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
On 1/14/14, 11:06 AM, glen wrote:
These smaller scale donations increase the interpersonal interactions
within
the neighborhood, effectively mixing the well off with the homeless.
And that helps how? To humiliate the people that need help?
They don't look humiliated to me. They look happy to talk to various
neighbors around a table of food. It seems to help soften the
narcissistically abstracted ideas of the well off. And it seems to make
the less well off feel like they have a clique to which they belong.
Plus, the kids love playing in the dirt with the adults.
You sometimes see similar reactions at shelters. But in shelters,
there's a very clear us vs. them vibe. Here, we all live within a 2
mile radius. The homeless people who sleep in the school yard right
next to the garden are just as much our neighbors as the guy with the 2
story house, 4 spotless motorcycles, and an RV in the driveway. Maybe
I'm wrong and all the ones who feel humiliated just don't participate.
Who knows?
Using a physical system metaphor (fluid flow), I believe in using
whatever mechanisms are available to encourage laminar flow between
highly disparate layers (wealth, opportunity, values being roughly
pressure, temperature, velocity vectors).. (top 1% vs homeless, first
world vs starving 3rd world) rather than to seek to *separate* the flows
and *engineer* very contrived connections (e.g. Social Service systems,
US AID, World Bank, etc.) between the two to try to relieve the
stresses. The stress of the impoverished observing the greedy go about
their business,and the stress of the greedy having to hear the wails and
growling hungry swollen bellies of those who are not even useful enough
to them to pick their coffee beans or sew their designer labels into
their opulent clothes, but rather displaced from their subsistence
lifestyles by one of the first world's "oopsies" like a proxy war or
engineered revolution gone bad.
If the 1% dedicate themselves to (also) improving the lives of the 10%
who are "almost peers", so that said 10% will have the resources to do
the same for the 50% who are *their* "almost peers", recursively on
down, then I think we have a chance. I do my part mostly by being
generous with those whose circumstances are recognizeable similar but
lesser than my own. The guy with the RV and 4 spotless motorcycles
might give (or sell at a generous price) one of his old clunker-bikes
to someone in the milieu who already has a drivers license and a place
to park it, understanding or even agreeing on a pay-it-forward to the
next level. In Reaganomics, it was "trickle down" (which made me think
way too much of plumbing fixtures) economics. In RainbowBriteEnomics it
is "hand-me-down" economics.
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