A Heart and a Helping Hand for the Poor

But what about those who are truly poor, are sick or disabled, face cruel discrimination, can't get any job much less a second job, don't know how to make a chart and don't know what to do? These are the poor whom Jesus loved and invited us to love. So, we pray for them, help find jobs, provide financial counsel and other help. This is the privilege given to Christians, churches, governments and others--to bless and help those in need.
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Financial counsel? Help? What help?

When someone faces what you refer to as 'cruel discrimination', it doesn't matter whether that person knows how to make a chart, a budget, or anything else. We are unemployable. In other words, nobody wants to hire us. Is there anything about that concept that you don't understand?

The corollary to this is that some of us ARE employable, but only if we are willing to sell our skills at a fraction of the pay that is given our able-bodied colleagues, to do the same job. It is called 'underemployment'.

I am an engineer with advanced degrees and over a decade of experience. In addition, I am multi-lingual, most useful in urban areas.

I could have found work, at about $9/hr with no benefits, like health insurance. 'Take it or leave it, you won't get a better offer', I was told. The man was right.

The disability didn't interfere with my productivity. In addition to being an engineer, I also had a degree in Landscape Architecture and six years of experience.

It would have been possible for me to set up my own consulting firm, assuming I could gather the funding. But that would have meant trying to get an individual medical insurance policy. I did the research and discovered that nothing even remotely affordable was available. Even with the policy, should I become ill, I would lose everything to co-pays and those bits and bobs that aren’t covered. Without medical insurance, I would have been working, paying off a mortgage on a house that would eventually have to be sold. All it would take would be a getting hit by an uninsured drunk driver, or even a nasty fall on the ice.

So I chose to remain on SSD. Naturally I was criticised. I was called 'lazy'. 'No one owes you a job', my stepfather sneered.

I thought about that comment. And yeah... someone did owe me a position. I had cared enough to get the education, and would have been a good and productive employee.

In the end a good and productive employee is what I became.

I am writing this from my beach house in France. My solution was to emigrate. I left the US and moved to a country where I easily found employment and excellent nationalised health care, not that I use it very much. My first move was to the UK, but within two years the company director sent me to France to set up branch offices on the continent.

The difference between the US and Europe is this. In Europe a disabled person with my education and skills is employable. In the free market obsessed US, people are forced to take whatever they can get, and with the employer providing health insurance, a pre-existing condition becomes a serious liability.

The condition is slowly worsening with age. However my needs are no different than what they were when I lived in the US. And I can supply my own special office chair.

Most important to me, the branch offices have increased company profits by 1/3, and I pay far more in taxes than I cost the state. Worth a bit more than $9/hr, I would say.

Funny thing though.... When I was preparing to leave the US quite a few people, many of them church people, came to tell me how sad they were to see me go, in part, as they put it ‘you have so much to offer’. Yeah... right.

Enough about me. What about my friend from Ohio? His name is Patrick. He has cerebral palsy and rides round in a smart blue scooter. His hands are constricted, and his eyesight isn’t the best. However, he is a computer expert, both PC and MAC, and one of the world’s experts on Speech Recognition software (amongst other things). He is articulate, writes like a dream, and has been published. He would like to find a job that pays enough so he can move out of his parents’ house. Health insurance would be nice. Oh, and he knows how to keep a chart.

Tell me, Rev Anderson. How many disabled people have you come across as you go about your daily life? You know: lawyers, bank tellers, school crossing guards, teachers, preachers, business drones in cubicles, secretaries? How many? Whatever happened to all those polio kids from the 1940s and 1950s? They just kind of disappeared, didn’t they? Most of them anyway.

When it comes to acceptance the US isn’t a very Christian country.

I don’t miss the US, and I’m certain that the US doesn’t miss me.

I mean, think about it, Gary. I know you're trained to think of 'the poor' as passive, lazy, helpless, a 'cross to bear' for the grudging better-favored, whatever.

But each of 'The Poor,' let me tell you, is a human being. A potential asset, not just a liability.

Maybe not by some competetive standards, but it can add up. If you stop trying to 'punish' the poor and support what they, well, maybe we, *can* do.

" Garyd:

Quite easy Roy because those programs not only aren't solving the problems they were supposed to solve they are for the most part exacerbating them."

Speak for yourself, GaryD. It's *corporate* welfare that makes the times harder. 'Small government' big money conservatives, deregulate the banking industry and make usury legal, then when they go on a feeding frenzy of predatory lending which of course causes a crash when the market inflation can't sustain itself, and taking away people's homes suddenly, finally, deflates the 'housing bubble' that kept people homeless or nearly so in the first place...

What does 'Government' do? Pays off the usurers to 'save the economy.'

Social programs for the poor, frankly, are the biggest bang for the buck in subsidizing the excessive lifestyles of those better off. It keeps prices of labor and goods and services *down* while keeping the value of what is *owned* up.

Then in the name of more profits, they *outsource the jobs* while claiming that it's cause there's still 'too much regulation here for us to make as many billions.'

Of course, we could *not outsource the jobs and thus reward third world regimes for *not* treating their people and our world better.*

But that'd be too 'Godless Commie,' right?

Social programs, infrastructure, and public works, if done right, aren't 'waste,' as conservatives claim of any charity someone didn't kneel and pray for, ...they are *investments* in the very *substance* of our nation.

Where *real* prosperity comes from.

I get very tired of people saying the disability benefits that keep me *in* the economy, and which my family paid probably five times as much into every working month of their *lives* as I personally get ..constitute me being a 'welfare bum,' when, OK, maybe I don't make the most profitable sort of minimum wage employee, but I've got more to contribute than spending my life trying to scrape up the next meal.

A *lot* of people have more to contribute than that, disabled or disadvantaged or otherwise.

Exporting the jobs in the name of 'profit' and then complaining that the poor aren't starving to the point of riot in the streets isn't responsible policy, ...it's unrealistic ideology, as much of a mirage as the notion the big banks and insurance companies don't depend on government to first get their way and then preserve their fortunes when their own blindly-competetive (on Wall Street) 'deregulated capitalism' goes wrong.

The exemplary capitalist corporate CEOs rely on public roads, public ports, public airwaves, and public needs to rake in their fortunes.

You can't make real prosperity out of a nation of people serving each other imported products and living at the mercy of the very rich's next quarter profits. Especially not while dumbing-down our own population and almost-deliberately-cheesing off the rest of the world politically when we rely on the same countries *economically* for the very standard of living some seek to preserve and most all aspire to. That just can't last.

Hard times? You asked for it. You got it. Someone was only too glad to sell it to you.

But it's not too late. Blaming the poor won't help. Hel, we were just talking about a conservative who voted against Food Stamps, got unemployed by conservative policies, then blamed 'liberals,' and went postal when he couldn't get em very long.

What is it you want, here, Gary? Virtuous and submissive serfs?

Got news for you. Fewer in that sort of scenario will be the 'lords' than they think.

Quite easy Roy because those programs not only aren't solving the problems they were supposed to solve they are for the most part exacerbating them.

We are likely spending at all levels of government in excess of 4 trillion dollars a year on various and sundry social programs designed to help the poor and the only result is that you can be more on more money now than ever before. On top of that the circumstances of poverty are worse than they've ever been and it's far harder to escape poverty than it has ever been.

ROY

You wrote, "It would seem to me the truly "Christian" attitude would be to support the former and shun the latter."

I would think that the ""truly "Christian" attitude"" would be to at least try to be a "Christian" and don't worry about whether anyone else is or not, no matter what "label" someone applies to themself.

As I have said, "The True, Living, Triune, Triumphant God is a searcher of hearts and minds, not of religious affiliations or lack thereof" as in, He looks at the person, not the "label".

As I have also said, "It is important What one does, and Why one does it and What one knows".

Take care, be ready.

Sincerely, Thomas Paul Moses Baum.

So why are most American "evangelicals," or the newly minted term "Orthodox Christians," neocon Republicans?

Neocons are not friends of education, health care, or most social programs. They are friends of big business, war, torture and capital punishment. It would seem to me the truly "Christian" attitude would be to support the former and shun the latter.

Your thoughts are commendable in that we recognize our needs to help the poor and we are grateful that many churches have such aid as a priority in their day-to-day operations.

But I have lived among the poor, shared in their daily struggles and have seen too much aid go to too few of the needy and - as the song goes, the beat goes on - and on and on.

Sadly, we miss out in dealing with the poor by leaving the task to agencies, committees, etc., where the "giving" is seldom, personal.

Note that the "good" Samaritan not only stopped and offered aid in the moment, he pledged to take care of the future as well. Experience will teach that this is the aid that is required, so that we who give have the opportunity of knowing the value of helping until there is no longer any need for help.

Yes, I know, I have heard those who insist the poor must make an effort as well, but giving and going merely perpetuates the notion that we are more guilty of having too much than really exercising the love that has been extended to us as believers.