Last week I went to a food distribution center and noticed 2 people talking in the line. One was an old woman and the other a young man. The center had not opened yet.
The young man claims he has learned a lot since getting off dope and turning religious. He says his bible is against free food and even against social security. He claims he has no social security and very little money.
The old woman says she is on social security and so is her older husband. She does not know what they would do without it. Then the younger man says he has SSI but wished he didn't. I started thinking of morons and then asked them both what they would do without it. How would they live or get by? The young man says if Trump gets re-elected he is going to change it or eliminate it altogether. The old woman says Trump is also going to protect us from Communism. Both of them claim god sent Trump and I told them they had not thought this out very well. Trump will not help you, I said. The old woman blurts out that all of the elected Democrats say that they hate America. I told her that we all know that is not true and talk like that does not get you elected.
Just then the head man appears and tells me that I sound like a Democrat that voted for Joe Biden. I looked him in the eyes and said that I did vote Biden but I'm more of a Progressive or Bernie Sanders man. He didn't like that but told me nobody in town liked him or his food distribution. The town claims he is attracting the homeless. This is when I reminded him that the homeless need food also and we all have to eat. I told him I live in a town up the road where a vacant house was burned to prevent the homeless from using it. I also work in a town where vacant buildings are burned for insurance money and the claim is that the homeless did it while making meth. This is how some people go about fixing the homeless problem. At least all of us could agree on that much.
Missouri is a GOP state and this food distribution center is run by a former doper who claims to have found Jesus in prison. He preaches and gives away donated food but he hasn't got his politics straightened out yet. In time he may do better or the town he is in will run him off. We shall see.
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3 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.All this post does is make me grateful that I don't live in the USA if people there really do have attitudes like this.
Social security was introduced in the UK to make sure that people who have worked, DON'T die in their old age from deprivation and starvation. They have paid for it in their taxes.
It is further there to make sure people who have lost their job, have a window of opportunity to find another one. Again they have paid for it.
And it is their for people who have suffered illness or injury and cannot work anymore (though many of them still do within their capabilities) something that is simply a matter of human decency, and anyone who says it isn't is a monster.
LenHazell53
Level 9
Oct 21, 2023
1
Much the same here in America but people are trying to dismantle it and get rid of it. We have no idea what they would propose in its place. Society as we know it would fall apart.
@DenoPenno As an outside observer, your social infrastructure has already been falling apart for years, but is constantly threatened with total collapse, because of attitudes to health care, personal armament, police corruption, self imposed apartheid, potential theocracy and religious fanaticism.
Doesn't your social security get paid out of taxes that everyone is required to pay on income or goods & services bought?
Why do people not believe that they have no responsibility toward the less able less fortunate members of society?
I don't understand & am left incredulous that a country that will create wars & spend trillions on armaments & munitions, particularly in the case where it's given to non citizens like Ukrainians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Afghanis, will not ensure that its people are adequately housed, fed & medically cared for? How is that creating a strong lasting country?
FrayedBear
Level 9
Oct 19, 2023
0
Social Security is an insurance program started by FDR and the money funding it comes out of payroll taxes that people pay in. People on SS or SSI do not always have enough to live on so food distribution programs help out. Our government itself only has responsibility through other programs and it gets all complicated. The right wants to end Social Security and the left wants to expand it. Programs that help all Americans are kicked around like a football. Many from the right think they should end Social Security even if they are benefiting from it. No one is smart enough to figure out what we would do with all the people on the program if it disappeared tomorrow. Even now some right wing areas want a person to "do a little dance" to prove they qualify. The claim against us having programs that would take care of all of us including our healthcare is that "we could not afford that." Lots of other governments with less money DO afford that and they take care of all their people. We should do that also.
@DenoPenno the simplistic way that I see it is that a sound country is one populated by people who are safely housed, employed, educated, kept healthy & encouraged to raise families of children who will become the next generation. Why would prople wish to live where there is inequality, where there is unfair distribution of wealth, where citizen taxes are not spent for the citizen's benefits but the benefit of billionnaires & large corporations corrupting politicians?
Without this you have nothing - why would people wish to live there or have children? The USA is still existing based on a delusion of its grandeur & pre-eminence in living conditions that have probably long passed resulting in the detrimental actions of supposed agencies supposedly working on behalf of the people by creating never ending wasteful wars killing & maiming citizens, deals like the Iran Contra affair or drugs sold in USA to fund illicit CIA programmes etc.
The religious mind does not care about reality, truth, education, science, or anything but their beliefs. If allowed, they will destroy themselves and anything else grasping for their beliefs to manifest.
People murder daily, and parents allow their children to suffer and die unnecessarily, all because of their beliefs. Imagine the power if you could control what people believe. Cons, politicians, governments, religions, and corporations all desire to control your belief, because people will sacrifice everything to have its manifestation, even if it is imposed upon them and against their personal and common good.
"Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication in the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves." Eric Hoffer (author of The True Believer)
nogod4me
Level 8
Oct 19, 2023
2
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