for each person like him (or you) there are many who have been “marginalized” or left behind. I know plenty of them too. And they need help.
Call me a redneck if you must, but mostly I see this business of anyone’s needing help, in terms of the help being where they find it. And if it isn’t to be found, it is where they make it.
Just about anyone can acquire short-term help from others just out of a certain sense of charity and goodwill that I still find most people capable of offering to those in dire and immediate need.
But that sort of help, whether of a Good-Samaritan or a Big-Government type, has extreme limits.
Try as anyone might to act in pure charity, there always remains the temptation of notching one’s own hatchet with acts of kindness toward Others, and reducing those Others to a sort of targets of opportunity. People who are a tad too primed to go looking for those in need of help tend to arouse a kind a guttural (and too often, accurate) suspicion toward their motives. Non-profit organizations which offer “help” are primarily running a business, whose funding stream relies integrally on caseloads. Helping others, is their means of having their salaries paid and their facilities sustained, while the sense of charity that may well have been at the roots of their founding becomes gradually a sort of un-businesslike indulgence.
Seeing homeless men in an Arctic cold front accept the blanket but turn down the ride to a shelter they already know locks its doors from the outside every night, might illustrate this point well enough. And I have seen this. To homeless people I have known, their worst hazard to navigate and potentially the gravest threat to their dignity and autonomy as human beings, is found among those in both the charitable non-profit and governmental sectors, and especially among those who pretend to be concerning themselves with their “mental health.”
A lot of people like to run the 2007–08 mortgage meltdown up the flagpole, and offer as a whole demographic deserving of “help” those who went on and lost their homes to it. That one doesn’t penetrate any sense of civic duty or charitable urge in me very deeply. They knew what they were risking when they signed those loan documents, and each of them knew what a gamble they were taking, to base the future of their mortgages on the future of their incomes not yet earned. If they didn’t, gee whiz, I expect they know now, don’t they?
Who am I or who is anyone, to declare broadly that people who couldn’t make payments they had contracted to make, need some kind of “help” from anyone? And in what form, and at what price, would that help be materialized?
In terms of young people entering adulthood, most of the help I see as needed and overdue, would come from the educational sector first doing its job of actually educating them with real-life skills rather than filling their heads with whatever doctrinaire and fashion-driven nonsense is being delivered by the campus intellectuals and the textbook publishers.
And, I think a lot of academic-adviser types need to re-think their whole sense of mission, and stop looking down their snobbish noses at the endless opportunities awaiting enterprising young people, to enter trades rather than attend these useless and over-priced universities for no particularly good reason. That would look in my eyes, like genuine help.
People who learn to help themselves, go as far as they choose to. People who learn that accepting help from faceless and indifferent institutions pursuing their own agendas is the only way forward, find out over the long term that this was no help at all. It is rather an acceptance of a life of utter dependency and indebtedness, only held out to them as “success” because someone who couldn’t care less about them had an interest in selling it to them.
So maybe you could elaborate on who it is you think needs this help, and on top of that what help you think might be available that would actually help them. I personally gave up chasing that rainbow. I risked ending up in a tent under a bridge more than once, in order not to be made a slave to those who pretend to be offering help. And undertook by whatever means I could find, to help myself.
