Truth's Refreshing

Have you ever passed someone with a cardboard sign proclaiming some tragedy and wondered if they were for real?  Will work for food.  Have you ever offered work to these folks?  I have. The response was always the same, "Are you crazy?"  There are groups of individuals who work together to beg a living.  They are dropped off at choice locations in the morning and picked up in the afternoon.  How do you know the truly needy?  I always look for the $100.00 running shoes, nice backpack with insulated water container, and several fresh packs of cigarettes at $6.00 a piece.  At a busy intersection these folks can make upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars in a day.  Why would they want to work for ten hours at minimum wage and make fifty?

An acquaintance posted this picture taken on a recent trip and said they gave the guy a beer and he seemed really excited.  This is not a post on beggars although there are parallels.  The truth is refreshing and causes us to respond in kind.  We become jaded at the continued lies of advertisers, politicians, businesses, and individuals.  If someone had a real need, I would be less likely to recognize it because I feel oppressed by governmental interference in the process.  Just think of the cost of administrating the programs allegedly designed to benefit the needy.  First on the level of the federal government, whole agencies are funded just to start the process.  The costs are astronomical and that's before one dollar is funneled to the States to further cloud the process with more bureaucratic red tape.  You can get the picture.  Get the government out of the picture and individuals will become re-sensitized to the needs around them and take care of it.  We are better able to detect the cheats and frauds around us and take appropriate action. We also get the joy of helping a fellow struggler if we become involved at the actual point of need.  The idea of equality is a Utopian myth.  The differences will always be there, but I have witnessed good folks helping others all my life and have seen the satisfaction of sacrificial giving and grateful receiving in the lives of the participants.  We need change alright, but it doesn't involve increasing the role of government.  Cut government, cut taxes, cut regulation and control, and get back to good old American self reliance.  Stop lying, stop cheating our neighbors, and stop looking for someone else to take care of us.  We need to take responsibility for making sure ethical people are sent to posts where decisions are made affecting us all.  We cannot use shallow criteria like skin color, gender, popularity, or physical attractiveness to decide.  The meaningless drivel of the great unwashed in our population is proving to be our undoing.  They are being manipulated and energized by groups of amoral power brokers who will tell them exactly how to vote by promising things they can't deliver.  They educate their own children in private schools while making sure the public schools cannot teach the basics of God and Country. Public schools have been neutered  and commanded to teach a pseudo curriculum of social sputum.  Requiring schools to attempt to educate everyone without requiring some accountability on the part of students and parents leaves the teacher to try and control those who shouldn't be there while at the same time teaching a State prescribed test  to those who desire to graduate.  I know there are exceptions, but in the inner-city where politicians do their best work this is the norm.  It is becoming the norm elsewhere because of unrestrained illegal immigration.  This has to stop.  Our schools should be exemplary.  We should be turning out the best and the brightest.  Get the government (State and Federal) out of the picture and return local control.  I could write for hours, but it all comes down to doing things ourselves and forcing the government to serve us in the limited capacity set out in our constitution.

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it.
  - Pierre Gallois