Pulling Yourself Up By Your Own Bootstraps

Last night I was in the company of a man who boasted of the accomplishment of having been the CEO of a corporation before he retired, a position to which he rose, as he hinted, by dint of extraordinary industry and intelligence.  At one point the talk turned to the large number of homeless in Sarasota, a city that enjoys a climate that not only favors the elderly with their constant aches and pains but also those who need to sleep outdoors without shelter.  I deplored the fact that Florida alone of the fifty states had passed a law making feeding the poor from soup kitchens illegal (a law recently overturned by a Federal court).  When he countered that there were a number of Community Pantries that distributed food, I pointed out that most homeless people hardly had the resources to prepare what they might get from a pantry let alone a can opener to open a tin of food.  He responded vehemently that he was happy to help people who were lifting themselves up, but he had no interest in the homeless who were shiftless and unable to do anything for themselves.  Like other successful people he seemed to me to ignore that not all people had the same drive or ability, while they were still somehow members of the human race.  Someone else I know has always prided himself on having moved far away from a family of parents who never finished high school and sisters who disappeared into marriage the minute they graduated high school.  But the parents were of a generation that never knew any different, and his sisters were victims of the Roman Catholic Church which dictated the tyranny and oblivion of marriage and children from which there was no escape, whereas he, a gay male, had to escape from the provincial homophobic world into which he was born, whether he liked it or not, thus gaining a purchase on the larger urban world in which he advanced through resolve and education to prestige and economic security.  This morning I read in the paper of a young woman connected by birth and relationship to most of the power elites of South Korea who had such clout that when a stewardess in first class on Korean Airlines offered her a bag of peanuts in a way that she woman considered inelegant she caused the plane to be returned to the berth from which it had just departed so this employee could be summarily sacked and forced off the plane.  In another paper I read about a young man who was a graduate of Harvard College and the Law School now a professor at the Business School, no doubt secure in his tenure, whose emailed order of a take out dinner from a distinguished and popular diner, which was founded and made to flourish by an immigrant from Asia, was billed for four more dollars than the online menu listed, for which oversight (the owner claimed that they had not got around to updating the online menu) this young man demanded damages of large sums of money, threats to take the fellow to court, to get him for violating a national truth in advertising law, in effect, to destroy him.  His business was to police the market for major American electronics and technology corporations, and into this maw his was planning to sweep this simple but successful ("the food was delicious," he was willing to claim) neighborhood entrepreneur.  This is how the world operates.  Many of the homeless on the streets are drug addicted and thus as we would say if they were a blood relative "ill," or they are mentally damaged and left to wander because the state does not like to pick up the costs of unattractive and usually incurable illness, but so, so many have from childhood been left to the vagaries of care provided by parents, family, school, and, yes, charities.  If we claim to be such a Christian nation, we might at least as Pope Francis is now directing us to give some thought to his teaching on love or as the Greek word is, charity.