From: ptfarre@afterlife.ncsc.mil (Peter Farrell)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: the problem of pain - query
Date: 17 Aug 92 06:12:09 GMT
Organization: The Great Beyond

In article <Aug.16.01.42.40.1992.1277@athos.rutgers.edu> SECBH@cunyvm.bitnet writes:
>
>As to "It sure ain't MY fault", one of the salutary points of
>contemplating ourselves is the eventual discovery of how much we
>are like our fellows in our faults, if not our circumstances.
>
>I found this posting quite jarring and inconsistent when compared
>with Mr. Farrell's previous postings on this topic, and examined
>as a stand-alone it seems to speak from a seat of judgement quite
>at odds with what I would expect the Christian context to be.
>
>Jack Carroll

Jack (and anyone else reading),
Let me explain my viewpoint.
My remarks about the poor and downtrodden are about this country and
and what I have observed.  Secondly, they are confined to the context in
which those of us who are hard-working people are routinely subjected
to subtle accusation for the plight of the homeless in this country. I
encounter from time to time other Christians who have swallowed some of this
and think it is good to contrast what we deal with here in the U.S. with
what you might see elsewhere. If we want to see poverty in its most
awful guise, America is not where it is worst.
My experience has been one in which I have given money and food and even
offered my home to a "homeless" person. I have listened to the media
blast the rest of the country with guilt every wintertime as the temperatures
drop, as if to say to me or any of the other people out there who are
gainfully employed and working steadily to provide for a family that we
are to blame. I have referred jobs to people who were on the edge and
I have even watched a homeless man eat the lunch my wife and I gave him
and treat us with the snobishness of European blueblood royalty; he wouldn't
even give us the simplest courtesy.
While walking the streets of Washington DC, I am routinely accosted by
people who are able-bodied, loud, arrogant, pushy and almost threatening.
They contrast GREATLY with the poor I have seen in other countries.

I do feel sorry for the little ones born into poverty. They and their
suffering do bother me. I cannot for the life of me understand what I
see in a place like Somalia where children are dying.

But nevertheless, to substantiate my rather harsh-sounding posture on the
subject, one example will do nicely:
One very cold morning (I think it was February or March) my wife and I
were walking down Constitution Avenue in Washington for an outing to the
museums. We met Holly (not her real name). Holly was wearing a cardboard
sign saying "Please Help Me. Have no home, no money, hungry baby to feed."
She held a plastic cup with a few coins jingling in it, and beneath her
shabby down vest we could see she held something close to her body like 
an infant.
We could not bring ourselves to walk past her more than a short distance
when it just got to be too much for us. We went back to Holly and asked
her some questions, and she showed us a very small 2-month-old baby
snuggled in layers under her vest.  We emptied our pockets of all our
loose change, took her with us in our car to a nearby grocery store
and bought her food, diapers, formula and some other items she needed.
Then we offered to take her anywhere in the city she wished to go, and
while she was with us we asked her where her family was.  She told us
her nearest relative was a grandmother in Chicago.  We offered to buy her
a bus ticket to Chicago.  She then said she and her husband were living
in a drafty old hotel some blocks away.  My wife got out of the car when
we arrived at this truly dilapidated old place and went upstairs with
her to help her with the groceries and the baby.  By this time we had
given her over 40 dollars in food plus all our pocket change, and were
trying to figure out what we could do to get her to her family.
We drove off and my wife told me that she saw dozens of old air conditioners
up in the hotel where the couple was staying; Holly explained that the
husband was apparently tinkering with the things to sell them for money,
but he hadn't gotten around to it. (We later surmised he probably got
the things from back alleys or dumps around the city; how he transported
them into his hotel room was another mystery.)
We got home and got on the phone looking for social workers, shelters,
anything we could think of for this young mother and baby. What we learned
next was one of the greatest shocks I have ever received in my life.
A social worker with a local city agency that routinely works with the
poor and homeless in Washington called us the next day.  After asking some
confirming questions about Holly and the circumstances, the social worker
told us her full name and that she was a long-time fixture in that part of
the city; she had SIX other children, all taken away from her for neglect,
and that preparations were underway to lift this youngest one.  She had
been routinely offered a room and meals in a women's shelter in the city,
but Holly had stubbornly refused, claiming she didn't feel like staying there
and that she was unwilling to do even simple menial tasks like sweeping a
floor in the shelter as some means of compensation to it for help. The
social worker told us we were particularly victimized by this con artist
and that Holly had been on their files for years!
Here was a woman actually using her own 2 month old baby as a prop! Moreover,
the social worker told us, the husband had been offered gainful employment
numerous times over the previous 2 or 3 years by this same agency and 
skipped out on several jobs, didn't even bother to show up at several others.

In closing, no, we did not help this woman just to be offered some accolades
or gushy thanks. We learned something quickly enough, however.  That here in
America, our so-called poor aren't always what they appear to be.  Moreover,
here in America, there is no excuse for failure and poverty, not when the
most abundant nation on earth has spent billions on education and social
programs.  I do not accept the notion that all poor and oppressed looking
people are innocent victims. One of the great shocks I think we will receive
on Judgment Day is when it is revealed how many people were nothing more
than decievers who were taking advantage of the goodness and decency of
their fellow citizens.
Now IF you want to consider the poor of, say, India, or Somalia, or the
beggars in Vienna or Mexico City or Cairo, THEN I would be a callous,
heartless depraved man with severe rebuke coming to me for such a viewpoint.
But HERE? No.  There are those who are in need and for whom I feel deep
sorrow. In our own church there is a woman who is being helped after
being abandoned with 3 children of her own by a faithless husband who,
2 weeks after leaving her, declared bankruptcy, knowing his action would
result in her being thrown out on the street.  She did not "volunteer" for
the position, no.  But Holly?  Some of the hottest places in hell are
reserved for ones like her, and I say her damnation is just.
What say ye, Jack?  Have you personally been in the fight like that?  Have
you literally emptied your pockets or bought one of them food?
In Vienna, I saw a man sitting there begging silently and I just emptied
every Shilling I had on my person into his empty hands.  The poor man was
so stunned, he actually looked up at me as his quavering voice stammered
thank you. I felt like a million bucks that night.
Yes. There will be surprises on the great day of judgment, when the sheep
are separated from the goats.
						Pete