If you look at this picture and think, "Yeah!" I will look at you and wonder if you're ready to read your Bible. If you are rejoicing over the price these poor will pay for their poor thinking, are you as ready to step up your tithe to the poor when they're cut off. Are you ready to foster and care for their children when they are arrested for the theft?
Have you ever wondered why we have a welfare system in the first place? Because not enough Christians put their money where their faith is. We have put the government in charge of our job: caring for the widows, orphans, and poor. So why can't the government weed out the ones taking advantage of the system? Because it's the government. Simple enough.
Meanwhile we had a run on goods. Is that really a surprise? Sure, some were simply out to get rich, but some were the desperate poor. If you haven't been desperately poor, let me explain that first of all, hunger hurts. It nags and burns and writhes within you. For one year during college I chose books and tuition over groceries. I ate rice for almost that entire year. I didn't even have enough rice. No, I didn't starve, but I ached with hunger. Because I was choosing my situation, I was never tempted to steal. But I have enough experience to know how simply and completely hunger can take over a person's thinking.
I can understand that someone who has to rely on the government to supplement their lives and hears the same news that I do that the government is failing, the dollar is precarious and the way of life we are living is coming to an end, and who then hears a rumor that shelves are being emptied at their local store just might react by going to that same store and filling up a cart. I can imagine myself thinking, "This might be the last of the food forever."
The poor will always be with us, remember. In our wealthy country, no one should ever go hungry, but they do. Every day, they do. When we justify paying young people or otherwise inexperienced and untrained people wages that no one can manage on, while saying, "You don't like it? Get a better job!", when we have the same tired arguments that the top tier "can't afford" to pay decent wages because the drive to make greater and greater profits is more important than the circumstances of those among us who are being ground up in the system, when we who have never once experienced life at less than Middle Class look down our noses at those who have never once experienced a day without want blame the poor for the very circumstances that make them poor, then we are not actually a Christian nation worshipping at the altar of the Lord but are in reality sacrificing the least of us unto Mammon.
If, even after reading this rant you still can't imagine that desperation can drive people to desperate measures, and if you can not look at your donations and be entirely sure you are not one of the reasons our government had to step in to fulfill the Christians' duty to the poor, or if you have forgotten the robber baron age of our very own history and are gullible enough to believe the corporate moguls who use up media bandwidth with their Libertarian drivel that the market can govern itself, then at least have the decency to sharpen your goatish horns on someone else's Facebook feed.
I'm too busy taking care of those "least of these" within my reach to have the time to attempt to smack common sense or even a bit of empathy into random strangers.
Just remember that making fun of the poor and pointing fingers at them is no guarantee that you will never find yourself in that number.
No comments:
Post a Comment