Torpedo wrote on Aug 15
th, 2013 at 2:22pm:
And guess what, these are the people who won't help anyone, not then, not now, when they are successfull and wealthy.
These people are not rich. These are just rodents in our society. And there is plenty of them, it's just our genius governments aren't looking deep enough.
I can see how your experience shapes your views. Maybe I could share my own and tell you how I got my views.
I had a midlife crisis at around the same time that the 2008 global financial crisis hit. What I saw around me was a competition between people on how much wealth they could accumulate. If you've read about the story of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in America, you'd know what I mean. Some people were buying maybe 3 or 4 houses and getting home loans and mortgages for them, even though some of them didn't have a job. You'd think the Americans had gone mad.
These people were borrowing huge amounts of money and overspending, pretending they were rich when they weren't. They didn't want their friends to think less of them. Eventually after accumulating huge mountains of debt, the economy collapsed because the banks weren't making any money from all this debt. People weren't paying them back. It wasn't just the USA, however. Europe was doing it too. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened here.
Ok, I mentioned debt, but that wasn't what I thought was the main problem. For me the problem was people overspending. The more you want, the bigger the lifestyle, the more you spend. It wasn't just a case of people living beyond their means. They just wanted too much.
At the time this was going on and I was having my "midlife crisis," I had been having a "competition" and "rivalry" with my high school "friend." We eventually stopped being friends as a result. I got sick of the competition, of working so hard and comparing myself with another person and that's what caused my "midlife crisis." My academic performance had fallen to a low. When Lehman Brother's collapsed and the financial crisis hit, there seemed to be a similarity. The USA and Europe seemed like they had driven themselves to exhaustion, just hoping to beat the competition, just like me with my studies. I had no energy left, just like the USA and Europe.
Getting to the 98th percentile in high school didn't matter anymore. I was just a bum like everyone else. I was a failure and I felt humiliated. I started dissociating myself from my "yuppie" high school peers and people who didn't have a university degree. I got my degree and finished my course, but the marks at the end weren't good and I pretended it wasn't worth anything anymore.
I felt like I was sinking into the deepest "hell," I would ever know. But I knew that if there was hell on earth, there was always something deeper, always someone less fortunate than myself. Well, of course there was ............. we all know that ............. but if I truly loved myself, truly cared about myself, I would care about these people too. Every time I saw them, I was looking in the mirror.
I got on a bus one day and two teenagers came up to me telling me they were homeless and asked for money. I handed it over. It was my first experience of how life must have been like for homeless people. Some 30 minutes later, the two boys needed to get off and the door didn't open properly. One of the boys got angry and kicked the door. He got into an altercation the bus driver and hit the bus from the outside. It wasn't casual swearing, the boy who kicked the door and hit the bus was obviously in distress and quite emotional. He was really angry. The other boy kept apologising for him.
In the months that followed, I got more requests for money from people on public transport, and it seemed like they weren't asking anyone else first. It seemed like a coincidence. How would they know I was going to say yes? If there was a God and he knew what I was thinking and knew I had had a midlife crisis and getting in touch with my "inner hell," it probably wasn't a coincidence.
I did meet another angry homeless person recently in the city's CBD. He got angry because my friend told me not to give him money and it started a fight. When my friend and I talked about it afterwards, he had a similar view to what you have. There are some differences, though: he was never homeless, but he isn't keen on the idea of people getting money for free.
I think that will be all for now ..... There was a bit more that I wanted to say, but I need to go somewhere.