Comments

3

I was just in Portland for a few days and the fact that our society not only allows people to live in the abject poverty and homelessness that we are seeing on the streets in Portland, but also chooses to vilify, denigrate, and humiliate the poor and homeless every chance one gets (no matter how short a distance up the ladder you may be above the poor and the homeless) truly sickens me. How about instead of screaming at a man digging through the garbage someone give him a meal? It isn't much and it doesn't solve the larger issue, but it is a kindness that can change things at a micro level, one life at a time, one moment at a time. My mom always gives $ to a homeless person near where we stay in Portland and even though she has been unable to find out how she can better help this person, she makes an attempt to help that person.

Imagine what society would be like if one person helped one other person in any kind of way they could on a daily basis? And then imagine what society would be like if we took some of the billions of dollars we spend on the military industrial complex and other bloated wastes of money in our public and private sectors and used it to help people in need.

It's very simple. There will always be people who need help. We can choose to help them or we can choose to scream at them and send them back out onto the streets to starve and die.

So far we have chosen the latter and as a society it is not working for us.

And yes, I do things that help others as much as I am able to, as close to on a daily basis as possible. As does my mother, who has known deep, scary poverty in her life (as did my grandmother). We wish we had a lot to give so we could give a lot and change the world. We do not have a lot so we give what we are able and work to change what we can, in our community, in our society, one person at a time.

4

This is a great I,A.

6

Great sarcasm, you had me going for a minute. As far as the big picture goes I'd rather be rich in love and poor in money than visa versa. In my experience the people who are always trashing the poor are the ones who got a leg up from their parents and have no clue what it takes to really make it in this world without help.

7

Well-written but extremely idealistic. Perhaps this employee had previously notified this homeless person not to rifle through the trash. Perhaps his manager set the policy and the employee was just enforcing it. We don’t know. But I do know MOST for profit businesses don’t want the homeless coming in and bothering their paying customers. They frequently lock the bathrooms to make sure only paying customers use them too. That’s just the way it is in the real world.

If you wanted to actually make a different you could have bought a burrito and given it to the homeless individual or given him a couple of bucks on your way out.

8

^exactly. This could be the 10th time this person rifled through the trash at this particular location, and perhaps he left a huge mess behind each of the previous 9 times. Homeless people aren’t exactly known for practicing the campsite rule with their trash cans of choice. So maybe the minimum wage employee was sick of picking up after him on top of all the other bullshit that they have to deal with. And there’s enough of it. This is the Pearl. The fact that you feel the need to publicly shame this person with IDENTIFYING INFORMATION no less is sickening. This is some black mirror bullshit. You and the 6 commenters who patted you on the back must feel awfully proud of yourselves. You sure are socially superior. Pardon me while I barf myself back to 1994 when these disgusting human tendencies were held in check by the fact that there wasn’t a nice safe false reality that socially sanctions this kind of idiotic black-and-white thinking.

10

No, I meant using the internet for the purposes of social control. Publicly shaming a minimum wage employee who may have been having a bad day hardly seems like a good use of time. It’s like you’ve never had to work a minimum wage job... I have, and it IS worse in the Pearl. Not because I long for what it used to be, but because serving entitled self-absorbed trust fund babies is challenging on a level you’ll never understand.


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