Comrade RAF, I`d say the "social parasites" are very few in number (at least on the lower end of the economic scale). People are born into ghettoes and slums thru no fault of their own. Like famine, these places exist because of the economic system we have inherited. It`s easy for those who have inherited wealth, or who have had lucky breaks, to exhort others to `pull themselves up by their bootstraps`. Let`s also not forget that governments often squash attempts at self sufficiency in communes etc. and a pool of unemployed is great for the capitalist class to keep wages low. Bother Mike
--- On Tue, 11/12/12, R A Fonda <[email protected]> wrote: From: R A Fonda <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Zen] Re: Compassion and zen To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, 11 December, 2012, 14:27 On 12/10/2012 9:33 PM, Joe wrote: those old places lived on the handouts and donations of others, already!, themselves!, and they had to be very, very careful about who they let in. Very true, but even today, let us imagine merle walking up to a modern American zen center and telling them that her superior vision of compassion obliges them to become homeless shelters, giving needy people "a thousand days" of food and shelter, or ten days, or even one day. One could hardly ask for a better example of how some people confuse "higher consciousness" with their self-righteous generosity with other people's money. I have no problem with them demonstrating compassion by giving their assets away ... I wonder how many homeless people she has living in HER 'squat'? The problem is that they band together to empower politicians to steal from the productive, and the political elites then share the loot with their kleptocrat allies or waste it on wars, or pay off their client electorates such as the government 'workers' and very little gets spent on the needy, many of whom, unfortunately, were social parasites rather than people who just had some bad luck. However, government mismanagement (including taking so much from the productive workers and investors) has now crippled the economy, so that there really ARE a lot of people who would LIKE to work, but there just aren't any jobs for them. Moreover, there are about the same number of unemployed American citizens as there are illegal immigrants, and people who share merle's views are SO compassionate toward those illegal immigrants that they don't stop to think how cruel it is for American workers to lose their homes because 'compassion' precludes reserving jobs for our own citizens. RAF
