It's against the law in several Florida counties to give food or money to the Homeless in public. One must now obtain a permit to give food or goods to the poor or hungry.
Also the number you can be generous to is limited by this permit.
Where has my country gone. Where is America, and what is this evil, and heartless thing that has replaced it.
3 comments:
Aldous Huxley predicted this decades ago in one of his essays. He wrote that based on the trends then observable over half a century ago, in the end only those officially sanctioned to do so would be permitted to practice charity: and so it has come to pass. He was a prescient man.
I also know of a charity group that has had major hassles with the police for giving food to the homeless. But this has been a matter of a civic police force interfering with them on the basis of trumped up charges, not a state law explicitly designed to keep people hungry.
This is morally repugnant in the last degree: and it's no accident that it's happening in Florida, home of Anita Bryant's Dade County campaign to Save Our Children, and the place where sex offenders are forced by residency limits to live under a motor causeway.
We're getting to be like the Puritans, who as a matter of policy habitually put homeless beggars in stocks to humiliate them for a while and then chased them out of town, telling them never to return. Heartless is damn right.
Sidney,
It has only been 3000 years or so since we humans began writing and reading. This awesome tool has helped us get lots of the things we learned as hunter-gatherers wrong.
Surely we will be able to pick up on what is psychologically built into us (helping each other) and get on and into a better world: Surely.
Loving U,
Will
PS: If I am wrong on the 3000 years someone please correct me. W
Wrong on two counts, Will - it's more like over 5000 years, as both Egyptian and Babylonian scripts are dated to somewhere prior to 3000 BCE.
And the arguments for inherent genetic/biogical altruism are utter nonsense. Certainly at any level higher than the family/ clan, competition to assure the survival of one's own group against intruders/outsiders, and not helping each other, is built in. Perhaps our writing-based cultures have harnessed that in the service of larger notional units such as the volk or nation, so far as people can be persuaded they still have something in common, like a bigger clan, but it certainly has not changed it.
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