From: al677@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jerry Cosyn)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa
Subject: A Touch Of Pride
Date: 14 Sep 1992 17:23:04 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc4.ins.cwru.edu


     I recently read somewhere about a clever plan to assist the
economically disadvantaged (pronounced: "poor") of America.  The idea
is that a government program be established to give these people, free
of charge, a home.  This would of course reduce the homeless rate to
nothing, but the real benefit mentioned in the piece I read was
something that I would never have thought of: it would give the poor
of the country a sense of pride of ownership.  Think of that!  Pride
of ownership.  What more could a poor person want?  Oh, sure, some of
you may scoff that they'd still be broke.  But what is mere money,
compared to a sense of pride?  Consider the great value, the enormous
benefit, of giving poor people everywhere the pride of ownership.  I
was enchanted by the very notion.
 
     In fact, I was so taken with this concept that I couldn't help
but bring it up at a party the other day.  I was convinced that
everyone present would see the greatness, the beautiful simplicity, of
such a plan.  But would you believe it?  There was some joker there
who just couldn't get it.  He started in right away, saying that pride
of ownership was merely an extension of the pride of accomplishment
and achievement.  He said that ownership of something, whether a house
or a car or a wristwatch, was just a physical manifestation of the act
of achieving, accomplishing or creating something.  It was a
representation of the rewards of one's efforts, and that reward
without effort, reward unearned and undeserved, was meaningless.  He
even went so far as to say that giving a reward to some people,
unearned, was a slap in the face of every person who'd busted a gut
and worked hard to earn that reward.
 
     Well, naturally I had to set him straight.  "Look," I said.  "If
you were walking down the street and somebody came up and gave you a
Rolex watch, you'd wear it, right?  And you'd be proud of that watch,
buddy.  You'd take it to work and show it around.  All the people
who'd worked hard to earn the money to buy their Rolexes wouldn't
matter to you.  You'd be eaten up with pride at owning a Rolex.
Ownership is what gives a person pride.  How you came by it is
irrelevant."  Well, I expected this simply logical argument to shut
him up.  But no, this guy was just plain bullheaded.
 
     "By that reasoning," he said, "Al Capone must have been one of
the proudest men who ever lived.  It didn't matter to him how he
obtained things.  Just the fact that he possessed them was enough for
him."  I could tell he thought he'd scored a point with that one.  So
I had to set him straight again.
 
     "But we're not talking about letting poor people steal," I
reminded him.  "We're talking about *giving*.  We're talking about
*compassion*."
 
     Well, do you know, even that logic didn't slow him up?  Right
away he started wanting to know *WHO* was going to do the giving?
What about the people who already owned the tenements and apartments
and houses that were going to be given away?  If the government were
just going to step in and take the deeds away from the current owners,
that was stealing, plain and simple.  Naturally I explained to him
that the current owners were probably scumbag slumlords who had gotten
possession of their property by unscrupulous and illegal means.  They
certainly didn't need to own that property as much as the poor people
did.  Those people needed pride of ownership, and somebody had to give
it to them.  Besides the government could always pay the current
owners for the property.
 
     So this joker went on about how the only way the government could
pay for these things was by robbing other people of their earned
wealth, and that the function the government was not to be Robin Hood,
and blah blah blah.  I could tell he was getting tired.  Then he went
back to talking about how pride had to be created, by personal action:
a man can be proud of what he does, how he acts, what he accomplishes,
but not something that's handed to him unearned.  He said you might as
well say that you could give a man an education just by handing him a
diploma from M.I.T., without making him take any of the courses.  It
was all pretty weak, you see.
 
     Well, I let him have both barrels then.  Explained to him how
important pride of ownership was, especially to people who hadn't done
anything to earn their possessions.  Told him that without that warm
sense of pride at having possession of something, no matter where or
how you got it, a person might never be able to serve society and the
common good.  He left then, muttering something under his breath.  It
was an easy victory for me, his arguments were so silly.
 
     But he did get me to thinking, when he mentioned diplomas.  I
think it would be a great idea to expand the plan.  While we're giving
away free housing, we should also throw in free diplomas, so those
poor people who never had a chance to go to college can have pride of
education.  In fact, everybody who doesn't already have a diploma
should be given one, from the school of their choice.  Why should they
have to do the work and earn it, after all?  The pride of just having
that diploma in their hands, or hung on the wall of their own personal
home, would really do them good.
 
     And you know, why stop there?  Hey, we could give away World
Series rings to everybody who wants one, so everybody could experience
the pride of sports achievement.  And Oscars could be passed out on
street corners, so anybody who needed it could have the pride of
achievement in acting.  You know, I bet in no time we could have
everybody in the country just running around with pride oozing out of
them for all *kinds* of things.  We could be the proudest people on
earth.  The hell with actually having to earn or achieve or
accomplish: it's the deed, the diploma, the trophy, the little piece
of paper that gives a person pride.
 
     And we all know that a country doesn't really run on ideas or
effort or accomplishment or work or production or achievement.  It
runs on *PRIDE*.  That's what we all need.  Give us some pride, on a
silver platter, and we can all stand tall.