I was listening to Glenn Beck tonight and he was interviewing someone about his charity, which is the Huntsman Cancer Center in Utah.
It was interesting to hear that this guy is giving to the center something in the tune of 2 Billion Dollars over the next few years and hopes to die poor.
Now to me this is the way it is supposed to be done, not have the government or Buffet tell us how it is to be done.
Bill Gates gives millions away every year but not to the people who made him the money. Buffet has done nothing with his fortune to help the US and the best one of all Oprah who has given nothing back to the US outside of big giveaways to promote products (I have very personal dealings with her and her charity which is a scam to me and others who asked her to help).
You know what her excuse was to open a school in South Africa, a country that like ours is rich – she has tried to help but failed because no one wants to take her seriously. Ok Oprah, when did you open a school here and offer free tuition to at risk kids?
I was reading about welfare capitalism before the advent of socialized everything and to me we need to return back to this somehow.
But anyway the issue for me is we have no poor. No one in this country can claim to be poor by real standards and no one in this country can not say there is no help – there is if they just ask.
To me the homeless issue is one of two parts, either mental health problems or plain laziness. Sorry but many fall under the former and we pretty much dismantled the mental health system in this country and shifted money to welfare – something that has outlive is goal. The latter view being homeless as a freedom, some sort of vagabond or bohemian life style with a bunch of books that are out there telling how to live on the streets. I don’t include drug addicts for a number of reasons.
To me our poor have the highest standard of living and a proverty level of a rich Philippine. Our poor have cars, TVs and even dress better then I ever did – even with my $800 suit. These are not poor people, they don’t know what poverty is all about – which we forgot a long time ago what it was like to be poor. Instead we have poor with credit cards, with iPods and who are fat.
I always said that my generation, the last of the baby boomers, have never had to deal with any real crisis. We for the most part only had to deal with Jimmy Carter and that’s it. I think that many of my generation hoped for a depression, a big war or something that we could at least say we did something but we can’t, which is sad because if we ever have a depression, imagine that the suicide rate will be rather high.
At one time, somewhere in Virginia or West Virginia I was buying cars and went to several houses that had dirt floors. My return trip there this past year I found new houses, new cars and a lot of new stuff (a walmart came to town). One family was amazed that I wanted the ‘junk’ that there grandfather left in the yard and I paid with fifties and hundreds which the kids never saw before. I am not making this up by the way, it is something that bothered me a lot, and I felt I was stealing.
When you go to Africa for example, you see what real poor people live like. You can easily see dying children and parents who don’t have the strength to eat; you can see the lack of just wanting to stay alive, no more hope.
When I hear about this poor person here who can’t pay the car payment or their $2000 mortgage, I get p*ssed off because there is no reason for this. When I hear about the housing that is going up in New Orleans, I get angry because many of the people who want to return can’t play an instrument and can’t get the money to rebuild or the city refuses to allow them to tear down their own property (that is a perfect example of letting the city deal with it without our tax money – nothing has changed and no one is in jail for killing people).
Oh well I am getting away from what I am trying to point out.
I think that we can do better if there is no safety net for many to use, if we have real communities that help people out that live in them and if someone gets off their a** and does something for a complete stranger unexpectedly and without even saying who they are, it could make a big difference. It really matters if people do it, not the government or some politician saying they can do it for us.
AND one last thing, there is no such thing as a less fortunate or unfortunate person.