I read several blogs daily; I agree with most because, really, why do I want to spend my time reading stuff that just makes me mad? But I do make myself read a left-leaning Christian site because it is important to see how the other side (and several family members) thinks.
Yesterday I read an entry by Shane Claiborne. Claiborne heads up The Simple Way, which he describes as a community of faith, an intentional community encouraging people to know, love and care for their neighbors. Claiborne moved to inner-city Philadelphia and set up shop there. He and his fellow intentional-livers commit to live simply in order that money and things not get in the way of relationships. (They commit to a whole lot of other things, too.)
His entry yesterday talked about something he and his followers did with a donation. I’ve got no beef with that. But I do have a massive problem with how he claims the money came to him: “…We were given an anonymous gift of $10,000, money which had been invested in the stock market and now was being returned to the poor.”
When I first read that I said, tongue firmly in cheek, “Well, I hope they turned in whoever stole that money from the poor people.” Because something can’t be returned to someone if it didn’t belong to them in the first place.
I recently heard someone say each dollar you earn represents a heartbeat. You trade a moment of your life for your paycheck. With a few clicks on his keyboard Claiborne completely disregarded each and every heartbeat his donor traded to earn his/her paycheck that enabled said donor to give $10,000 to Claiborne’s ministry.
Words have meaning, a fact I try to remember each time I publish a post on my blog. I just wish some other bloggers would remember, too.
BRAVO MRS DUFFY!!! This entitlement world view will be the demise of our very way of life. It is shocking to me that people feel as though they are owed something. Yesterday someone said to me that health care was a GOD GIVEN right! Sometimes I can't breathe from my apoplectic fits of rage. Unfortunately, as my very wise husband always says... "You just can't fix STUPID!"
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ReplyDeleteIt's possible to oppose the entitlement mentality and still believe that when someone is dying and there's a treatment that can save her, and she works long hours at a cash register job and doesn't have tens of thousands of dollars for that treatment (say, US costs for medicines, doctors and lab work = $2000 a month), she's abso-darntootin-lutely "entitled" to it.
ReplyDeleteObviously this is personal "anecdotal evidence". This is, in fact, my daughter. But her situation has made us acutely aware that she's not an exception, health care pricing is out of control. There are a patchwork of charities and plans out there but because she works she has been disqualified from them all so far. When other industries force consumers to pay extortionate prices and arrange their deaths if they don't, we call them things like "Mafia."
I think a lot of people do not understand that health care is one thing that cannot be afforded and provided for oneself by all the personal responsibility, hard work and self-reliance in the world. I'm amazingly conservative when it comes to free market, because i think it works pretty well for things driven by competition, consumer choice, supply and demand. Health care can't be market-priced because it's worth one's life. Literally.