Some times you gotta respond

Dear friends,

thought you might enjoy this short story; I did.


I was talking to a friend of mine's little girl the other day. I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up and she replied, "I want to be President!" Both of her parents are liberal Democrats and were standing there. So then I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied, "I'd give houses to all the homeless people."

"Wow - what a worthy goal." I told her, "You don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where this homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward a new house."

Since she is only 6, she thought that over for a few seconds. While her Mom glared at me, she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"

And I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party."

Her folks still aren't talking to me.

MY RETORT:

Every so often I get forwarded an email by a friend that I totally disagree with. Most times I ignore it and delete it, as I did this one. That was a couple of days ago. For some reason this one stuck in my mind. It just won’t go away. So this morning I dug it out of the trash and re-read the thing, it still bothers me. Where do I begin? This, “little story’” implies the reason the homeless man is homeless is because he is lazy and unwilling to work. Therefore his homelessness is perfectly acceptable. I’ll get back to this in a minute. It implies the 6 year old child understands more about the world and life than her liberal democrat parents. Whoever wrote this, “little story,” if it is true, is a small person indeed who would use a 6 year old to gain the proverbial upper hand over the parents. This, “little story,” most of all smacks of the meanness which is all too pervasive in our country today. Meanness and self righteousness never have and never will do anything to resolve the myriad off issues facing our nation today, NEVER!
This, “littler story,” didn’t go quite far enough. Why is the homeless guy who hangs out at the grocery store homeless? Is he missing a limb? Is he schizophrenic? Did he loose his house in a fire, Katrina, because the job he worked at for 30 years moved to China? Is he a child who ran away from an abusive home? Does he have an illness that prevents him from working, i.e.; Alzheimer’s, cancer, arthritis? Is he elderly and his social security doesn’t pay enough to cover rent and utilizes? If this was explained to the six year old the answer could have been much different. Assuming the homeless guy is capable of work why is he not working? Could it be he has lost documentation and because he is homeless, hasn’t the financial ability to replace such documentation? Could it be he has no job because he has no address or phone number so a potential employer can contact him? Could it be that he lives in an area with few jobs, so he would have to find work elsewhere, he has no car, and there is no public transportation? What I’m getting at here is LIFE isn’t as simple and straight forward as this, “little story,” would have you believe.
If being a republican means being as simple as a 6 year old child, if being a republican means not paying attention to the larger picture, we are all up the creek without a paddle. Whom ever wrote this story, why not go down to the grocery store and hire the homeless guy to mow your lawn for $50.00. I think that would have been a great example for that 6 year old child. Of course then you couldn’t be so smug.