Something goes on in people’s minds when they start talking about poor people that doesn’t happen with your average middle class person and certainly not rich person. People assume they know the general outline of the poor person’s story which can be whittled down to the person fucked up and somehow deserved the consequences of their mistakes. Poverty and the attendant despair teach a great lesson. How else will they learn? Right. This kind of help has proven itself enormously successful with this nations homeless problem. If anything, the present spirit is that all this mollycoddling we shower on the homeless is part of the problem. There are some people who think we should do even less than the very little we are doing now.

Any way I digress. I was talking to friends about a person who is having financial problems. She lives month to month and needs every penny she can get. More than once in the discussion, people said that her situation was shocking because she was a good person and undeserving of such problems because she worked hard all of her life. Of course, I nodded my head in agreement. Poverty shouldn’t happen to good people.

There is the rub however. If good people shouldn’t be poor, then the unspoken part is poor people are somehow bad. They deserve their fate. They either behaved badly or made bad decisions in order to find themselves in such a state. And because of that, they must pay. Indeed, the most important thing, more important than helping them, is that the poor must realize that they made a mistake and their poor judgement is the reason they are poor and suffering now. If we don’t make them pay, they will just continue making more bad decisions.

If I needed any more evidence of how bad poor people are, earlier in the week I saw the following in Facebook:

God forbid that the poor experience anything other than looking for a job and suffering. You simply aren’t suffering enough if you have a beer and a cigarette. You are a bad poor person and are certainly undeserving of any help if you would spend your money on such luxuries. Give me a break.

Try this on for size. Jeff Bezos receives government tax breaks. This means, he doesn’t have to pay all of his taxes because the Government wants him to invest in his business. But because we give him a tax break, he has more money to spend on drinks, first class hotels and his own god damn airplane. Does he really need those things? Of course not. Yet, he is getting a government handout and he dares to have a good time while getting them. If he needs these tax breaks so badly, he should be only spending his money on his business and nothing else, and certainly nothing that might be considered fun. Both the poor and the rich receive government money but we only police the poor on how they spend this money.

This is because we give the rich the benefit of the doubt. We assume that they are good people unlike those horrible poor people who are bad. They are drug addicts, they sleep on our streets, they beg for money, and, horrors of horrors, they are doing it in front of me. It taints everything we do as country for poor people but we sincerely believe that unless help comes with a healthy dose of disapproval, the poor will never change.