Regarding the homeless …
the poor …
and right now particularly, the veterans.
If we can’t see them they don’t exist in our moral conscience.
They are subject to priorities governed by agency number crunchers
… governed by legislatures driven by political considerations and misguided perceptions of how the public feels about it’s military society and its poorest segment of society.
Welfare reform as legislated nationally by the self-righteous political thugs a la Gingrich-America-contractors in the mid 1990’s was in some ways cynical – primarily driven by negative images designed and created by the framing forefathers of partisan swift-boat crowd that can turn Johnny Appleseed into Oil Can Henry.
Images…
a single mother standing in the grocery checkout line with a child sitting in the grocery cart and with food stamps in her hand
… surrounded by presumptuous non-food-stamp patrons smug in awareness of being “better-than” and resentful of that young mother
who probably cheated on her application in order to qualify for food assistance.
Furthermore, I’ve met smug Daddies who have bragged about their sons’ studhood; their procreative ability to seduce girls but then dodge responsibility and accountability when that stud-ness results in conception;
… jerk baby-boomer-aged blowhards who actually insist that the slut who lured their wunderkind son into bed deserved what happened. Despite birthing his grandchild she deserved nothing from their son but contempt.
Except when after the child is born they sometimes push their sons into courtrooms for custody of what might be their only grandchild.
What happens in a society when a father teaches his son irresponsibility and that it’s okay to whisper anything necessary in the dark in order to get the clothes off?
And then find the junior-high-level maturity of that lover-boy stud in a tavern bragging pridefully about how they did it while whining indignantly when the Division of Child Support comes knocking.
Single pregnant females of course are accountable and responsible for their pregnancy as well as the males. But we as a society tend very much to blame the mothers almost entirely, look the other way regarding a criticism of the father because he’s out of sight and therefore out of mind.
That’s the same sort of thing that drives public apathy toward the homeless.
And don’t get me started about churches who get all straining and diahhretic about what gays are doing but don’t pour out of their churches and into the street in moral outrage about how a nation stays bereft of real morale values while worshipping consumption.
Curmudgeon at Work 