Good Samaritans Wanted

Often it seems that folks like me are paid by Washington citizens to do what they not only cannot do but refuse to do themselves ... get involved with the needy.

I suppose you could call me a professional getter-involved, do-gooder

... or perhaps a surrogate who acts for all those who could but won't

... or perhaps welfare workers are like those surrogate warriors hired by early affluent "patriots" to fight in the revolution so they didn't have to.

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 today's swift-bloat 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 - not knowing what I do for a living - have bragged about their sons' studhood; their procreative ability to seduce girls but then dodge responsibility and accountability when that studdiness results in conception;

... jerk baby-boomer-aged blowhards who actually insist that the slut who lured their wunderkind son into bed deserves what happens. Despite birthing his grandchild she deserves 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 after I open up a cash assistance case for their child and the child's mother?

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.

If I arrive home from work upset, more often than not I'm angry at the mindlessness of agency bureaucrats or the cowardly indifference of absent relatives of the needy.

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.