Bookmarks:
Homeless celebrities • Discovering Nina Simone • 10,000 Boomers retire every day • Woman found beaten to death; daughter arrested • The border crisis
Tag Archives: Entitlement
3) Get your hands dirty.
| <– 2) Give up the word “deserve.” | Home | 4) Invest your own money. –> |
There is no substitute for personal, hands-on, sustained contact with the poor.
Do not use the state as a proxy. Do it yourself.
Build relationships. Acquire poor friends.
Who pays for Medicare? Etc.
When needs are met
This is the third of three posts about entitlement:
07/12 – “Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy”
07/19 – “How I became homeless”
Today – “When needs are met”
I have no trouble sharing my candy, when I have plenty.
Jim Snyder even offers people cigarettes, when he has plenty.
When needs are met, one becomes generous.
Continue reading When needs are met
How I became homeless
This is the second of three posts about entitlement:
07/12 – “Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy”
Today – “How I became homeless”
07/26 – “When needs are met”
This is a long post. One may want to avail oneself of a navigation resource here.
I don’t write about easy things.
At this writing, a more immediate question is how I’ve stayed homeless, which has prompted no small amount of anger and depression in recent weeks. The short answer appears to be that I’ve stayed homeless the same way I became homeless.
Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy
This is the first of three posts about entitlement:
Today – “Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy”
07/19 – “How I became homeless”
07/26 – “When needs are met”
Let’s get rid of (the term) entitlements
“In 2012, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone represented 44 percent of spending; all entitlement programs were 63 percent. But it’s hard to control entitlement programs because their constituencies are so large.”
It makes sense to me that, as Samuelson proposes, we should discard the term “entitlements” as naming portions of the federal budget that are untouchable. No program should be sacrosanct.
Continue reading Entitlement(s): Attitude and policy
Give from abundance
I normally only publish on Mondays (comments on the news), Wednesdays (recycling old posts)* and Saturdays (substantial new pieces). A couple things happened this morning that seem to me urgent enough to warrant an off-schedule post.
I’d invite e-mail subscribers to hold on to their e-mail copy of this post, and will explain why.
Bookmarks:
Give from abundance • Out on a limb
Why I believe in astrology
I came to belief in astrology by a very strange route.
MY “MONTHLY”
Sometime between 1985 and 1995, I became aware that, for years, roughly once a month I had faced a personal crisis; and some of these were pretty severe.
Continue reading Why I believe in astrology
Beans and rice
Trump’s Budget Would Partly Replace Food Stamp Benefits With Canned Goods
I respond to the first paragraph only. Nothing else. The first paragraph.
Beans and rice are nothing to despise.
I first applied for food stamps in 2004. I had had a professional career for 25 years, and for three generations not one member of my family had ever been subject to any form of “welfare.” Now I sat in a 40-by-40 lobby full of people, filling out the forms. Assets: –0–. Bank balance: –0–. Income: –0–. And I wept. I cried like a baby.
A sister-in-law, an #immigrant, responded to this news by waging a campaign for the family to disown me. She would later tell her husband she did not want to be married to a man whose brother receives food stamps. To my family’s credit, her campaign failed. I’ve been through tons of difficulty, and to their credit, my blood kin have never left me.
Beans and rice are nothing to despise.
In my current world as a homeless man, I deal with many, many people who persevere in need BECAUSE they despise every single blessing God provides. My only hope, currently an active hope, to improve my own lot, rests in being GRATEFUL for every blessing God provides.
Beans and rice, for example.
So, here we go: Poor people, listen up! Just in case you DON’T despise every single blessing God provides, it’s OK.
#Liberals like @Arthur Delaney stand ever-ready to despise it FOR you.
Why do roses have thorns?
Are thorns happy?
Friday, December 1, Bounce showed Steven Seagal’s Above the Law.
He always plays opposite some eye candy, a term I learned from a Doonesbury strip about Uncle Duke’s presidential campaign. In Above the Law, it was Sharon Stone. In On Deadly Ground, it was Joan Chen, a Chinese actress cast as a Native American, with no real function but to look nice and follow him around.
“Eye candy” isn’t a mere phrase. I saw again that when I see a pretty woman, such as Stone in that scene, I get a sweet taste in my mouth. This is a physiological reaction, and potentially raises lots of questions about how we respond to beauty — or ugliness.
Related: For us.
I have much the same reaction whenever I see a rose.
Which recalls my interactions with that rose bush in the garden. Continue reading Why do roses have thorns?
