A Timothy Egan New York Times editorial (Dec, 22, 2013) talks about a Montana wheat farmer who gets $300,000 a year in federal subsidies. He spends a month in Hawaii. The title of the editorial is “Good Poor, Bad Poor.”
He also talks about a homeless girl named Dasani, who is “at the center of Andrea Elliot’s extraordinary series in the New York Times — a Dickensian tale for the modern age.” New York mayor Mike Bloomberg said of this homeless girl named Dasani, “the kid was dealt a bad hand, I don’t know why, that’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky, and some of us are not.”
So what is it mayor, is it “God’s work,” or is it luck? As far as I can tell it is neither.
Very easy for a very wealthy man to put it back on “God,” that it is this “God” that decides, and has nothing to do with this greedy self-centered system known as capitalism.
Let’s plug the wheat farmer and Mayor Bloomberg into Bloomberg’s belief – “Well me, I was dealt a good hand, I don’t know why, that’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky, and some of us are not.”
This has nothing to do with God or luck. The wealth of both Bloomberg and the wheat farmer is disturbing. The homeless girl sits in the street based on a system of how we provide or do not provide for ourselves. Bloomberg does not want to take responsibility for the real reason this girl is homeless, he just puts it back on his God. This is convenient, since no one can call up this God and ask “Why the hell did you put that little girl in the street?”
They give the wheat farmer $300,000 a year to grow wheat, but then they don’t want to give poor people a subsidy to buy the wheat. What bastards!
Dasani’s “bad luck” is being a child of capitalism.
Frank Erickson lives in Minneapolis.
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