Yesterday I was privileged to share some time with a fairly successful author of technical books. This was a pleasure for me as he writes about the field I work in. He was very smart, and successful and clearly fairly wealthy. I knew he was well off as he talked at length about his beautiful new house and showed me pictures of the vast acreage and home. He has a wonderful family, and was proud of his healthy newborn son.
So I was surprised when I went to lunch with him to hear him complain about the homeless in San Francisco. He wasn't complaining that there were homeless. He was complaining that they got a $500 check each month after registering with the city.
He complained about how he was bombarded by beggars. He said that the $500/month was a big reason why San Francisco was going bankrupt, and that the city smelled like piss because so many homeless people shacked up there.
But what most surprised me was when he said he grew up with kids whose parents were on welfare and they would come to school "wearing nicer clothes than I did and really expensive shoes."
Why, when you are living the American dream, do you hold a grudge against the poor kids you grew up with? Why do you hate the bottom 10% so much I wondered, but did not say.
He claimed that he was far more liberal when he was younger and had grown more conservative with age. It seemed to me that he grew more conservative with wealth (I myself have become more liberal with age - starting out as a Reagan republican). This is a logical progression out of self-interest - the wealthy prefer to keep their wealth. A liberal democracy wants to tax the most wealthy to help the least fortunate. The hatred of the poor seemed to me more of a self-denial of his own selfishness.
What was I supposed to say? I laughed at his jokes about the smelly elevators and "beggar-shield" scowl. One of my faster thinking co-workers pointed out that giving food and shelter to the poor keep them from desperately robbing you. A good point.
But it's nagged at me since that lunch and I realized later why it bothered me so.
There will always be a few people who are incapable of fitting into our society productively. If we don't help the bottom 10% what are we to do with them? Ship them to concentration camps? Shoot them?
Said Mother Theresa: "We will be judged on how we treat the least among us". Most of the poorest of the poor cannot help how they are. By my thinking, the problem isn't that San Francisco is giving the homeless a $500 stipend to buy food, its that nobody else will.
Yes, a few people will learn to game the system and take advantage of it. But if they give their kids nicer clothes or shoes than an honest lower middle class family can afford, is that really so awful? We can do our best to prevent it, modern society surely has ways to give the money that is most beneficial. But we shouldn't just stop giving aid thinking of it is an incentive to failure. Not when it is at the expense of helping those who really do need it.
Why couldn't I find these words when Mr. Success ranted on about the homeless in San Fran?