Quote:
Originally Posted by Purrybonker
There is a fundamental perspective that creates a divide in how we view and judge each other...
Free will.
Many of us credit ourselves with our accomplishments and attributes and are trigger quick to look down upon others who, in our assessment lack the same.
Fat shame, poor shame, lazy shame. Name it shame.
Well, to keep things in context of this thread. How about the example of a wealthy person leaving a portfolio of income producing rental properties to a ne'er do well, drug abusing, debauched off-spring?
The same sort of decrepit, to all appearances "lazy, non-contributing", dude as is being harangued repeatedly in this thread.
In our culture and narrowly within this thread, said lazy butt off-spring is an example of a fine upstanding member of society, whereas his doppelganger, lacking a wealthy birthright is not.
One is implicitly virtuous, the other not.
The same principles apply to birthrights of brains, work ethic, mental illness, physical disabilities. None of us can take credit for any of the hundreds of lotteries that most of us have won.
But we do it repeatedly, in spades.
It is shameful and completely unproductive to be critical of the disadvantaged and evidence of massive hubris in crediting ourselves for being born and raised with qualities that have allowed us to be successful.
Such thinking is also self-defeating. We dislike the poor and street people - they make us feel just a little bit more crappy about the world we live in.
So we label them as lazy and lean toward denying them assistance because we judge them on our own personal scale rather than stepping out of our own paradigm and considering that there may be a whole bunch of other ways of being a human being that we do not even understand.
It is pretty clear that the majority of homeless people live with disabling mental health issues.
I've gone to McDonalds at 4 AM after a late night debauch of my own and had discussions with homeless geniuses - literal geniuses who can speak at a PhD level about history as an example. I actually know of a PhD who barely survives to all appearances, working as a parking lot attendant.
Again, I apologize for my digression. The topic here is supposed to be about landlords and tenants and so on. But I admit to being frustrated with the ubiquitous ad hominem perspectives found on this type of forum.
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No doubt there are people who mental issues, and need help. Most are addicts, who have self inflicted these wounds.
The issue here is that no-one wants to be accountable for anything anymore, including themselves. A lot of people make excuses for these people. This is has gotten worse over the past 20 years (I’m assuming we can agree on that point). People really don’t change; what has changed is that there are no consequences for making bad choice after bad choice. Safety nets have turned in to permanent support systems.
Go ahead, go do meth on the street, go shoot up some dope, toss your needles anywhere. You need something, just go steal with from the store on the corner, we made it practically legal, so you won’t get into trouble. The problem is the places that are having major issues, are allowing people to self destruct. It is shameful and completely unproductive to allow and promote these disadvantaged to just waste away to nothing, Such thinking to allow these people to do so is also self-defeating.
One may hate and dislike these people, I do not, so please don’t make it a “WE” thing, I can recognize that allowing this to go unchecked is harmful to them, it is harmful to everyone, and apparently contagious. You seem like a person of above average intelligence, how can one be blind to the fact that having no consequences is essentially promoting this, where is the compassion to prevent and to disallow these people to ruin themselves, and usually the people around them. You want a pound of cure, I want an ounce of prevention.
Not far from my shop, is an apartment building, 12 unit building, rented as all utilities included. Every tenant quit paying rent, after like 6 months the owner of the building quit paying utilities because they couldn’t afford it anymore. The owner of the building is now in the court system as the bad guy. Last I heard the building was being condemned.
Many people are taking advantage of the situation, Go read about Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment, and tell me that you don’t see the parallelism to which direction our society is moving.