> In December, Cheatham, her children and their father qualified for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Mountain View.
> The couple isn’t completely reconciled, but they came together to provide a roof — one that’s not welded to a chassis — over their children’s heads.
> “We’re working things out,” said Cheatham, 37. “The most important thing is to have a stable place for our kids.”
It's amazing to me to see / hear of parents, who even after disagreeing badly enough to divorce, are able to come together to care for their children. It's hard for me to even fathom how much work and humility that would take. That they were willing to talk to each other at all is, in its own right, remarkable.
I have been fortunate enough to have always lived in a secure home, and I've never needed to sleep in a car out of necessity- the only times I've gone camping are as a Boy Scout (okay, Scouts BSA member), when a warm shower was only a day or two away. As for the policies: Cars are, besides being a little awkward to sleep in, a lot more secure than a tent is (and more fireproof, to boot). With the understanding that all it takes is one mistake for a poor family to become an even poorer, homeless family, I feel like a lot of these "parking overnight, or being homeless = vagrance = illegal = fines" laws can be a little out of touch- they're generally written by college-educated politicians, many of whom have never had to do anything of the like, and who don't understand that a $50 fine when you can't even pay rent is really bad.
Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?
>Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?
I think that's the natural consequence of having spent years pushing the idea that being poor is a personal choice or a lack of character. Once you make the connection that it's directly linked to a lack of character, you can be punitive instead of providing a safety net, and punitive is much cheaper for those of us with high moral character.
It takes less energy to kick a man that's down, or to step over him, than to hoist him to his feet and keep him standing.
I read "high moral character" as sarcastic equivalence to "not poor". I presume that it is very common for people who have never been poor, or even at risk for being poor, to attribute their good fortunes to an imagined causal factor within their own sense of identity, rather than being entirely due to random chance. They reason that they are rich because they are good, and then, though back-formation, also reason that poor people are, if not entirely bad, then at least less good.
Thus, "people of low moral character" becomes a euphemism for poor people. It is shot through with fallacies of reasoning and circular argument, but based on the statistics, many rich people didn't get rich by being smart, either.
To someone with this type of worldview, poor people deserve to be punished. And since it's less effort than helping them to be less poor anyway, everybody wins. Nobody who deserves wealth has to become less rich in order for other people who don't deserve anything to be less poor.
I can't say for certain whether or not this is a real thing, but the hypothesis does fit a lot of observations.
I think s/he's being sarcastic about saying that moneyed people have "high moral character".
To expand in what was said, when meritocracy teaches you that hard work will always bring success (ignoring luck), then the opposite must be true: if you're poor, it must be because you're lazy.
And rich trustfund kids/lucky startup bros need to believe they have moral character instead of just rich parents/luck, so they think they're righteous people when in reality maybe they're dicks.
You could read it as “It’s cheaper for the not poor”. Parent comment mentions that in their country, being poor has come be seen as a choice and the poor as lacking in character. So being not poor means you have high moral character.
The amount of social services available to the poor has no impact on the fact that many people look at (and treat) the poor horribly, and act as if it is their own fault they are poor.
Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?
You could just say "authorities punish the poor for being poor while pretending to help them up". We have reached the point where courts demands that when police move homeless people on that these police offer them a place in shelters. So, you wind-up with a situation where phantom shelter-beds are created. The (mostly) fiction of attempting to help people has to be maintained while the primary intention to remove them as annoyance, knowing they'll reappear elsewhere.
And yeah, allow tiny house camps on private land and you'll reduce the incredible pressure towards higher rents (or build public high rises like the old days or whatever). But then a whole lot of land value is threatened and so the concerned, naive homeowner becomes the threatened homeowner.
> The couple isn’t completely reconciled, but they came together to provide a roof — one that’s not welded to a chassis — over their children’s heads.
> “We’re working things out,” said Cheatham, 37. “The most important thing is to have a stable place for our kids.”
It's amazing to me to see / hear of parents, who even after disagreeing badly enough to divorce, are able to come together to care for their children. It's hard for me to even fathom how much work and humility that would take. That they were willing to talk to each other at all is, in its own right, remarkable.
I have been fortunate enough to have always lived in a secure home, and I've never needed to sleep in a car out of necessity- the only times I've gone camping are as a Boy Scout (okay, Scouts BSA member), when a warm shower was only a day or two away. As for the policies: Cars are, besides being a little awkward to sleep in, a lot more secure than a tent is (and more fireproof, to boot). With the understanding that all it takes is one mistake for a poor family to become an even poorer, homeless family, I feel like a lot of these "parking overnight, or being homeless = vagrance = illegal = fines" laws can be a little out of touch- they're generally written by college-educated politicians, many of whom have never had to do anything of the like, and who don't understand that a $50 fine when you can't even pay rent is really bad.
Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?