Few working at Staples make a living wage.

[Honeycombe8]

153. When you address me, you are speaking to the working poor, the homeless, the uninsured...

all these things I have been. I know more than most what it means to be poor.

You do no one a service by encouraging him to accept his situation and not at least try to improve it. Do you want people to be unhappy and feel undeserving? Do you really believe other people are too stupid to do better? I don't.

I care a lot about people who are in the situation I was once in. If I had listened to "NO YOU CAN'T" people like you, I'd still be there.

People laughed at me...a group of people literally laughed at me...when I told them I was going to go to my vocation school. They thought it sounded pie in the sky. It hurt me deeply. They were people like you. Who thought I couldn't make something out of it. I went to my little vocation school, anyway. And I moved to a place with a diverse economy (far, far away from those people who laughed at me). I got a good job and probably ended up getting paid more than most of those who had laughed at me.

I am FOR Obamacare, FOR Social Security, FOR Medicare, FOR food stamps and welfare, FOR a min. wage, FOR single payer health care. But a person in a bad situation needs more than that. It will never get much better, even with all that, without a skill or vocation or living in a place with a diverse economy and public transportation. That's reality.

You are the one who really doesn't give a rat's ass about the people in trouble. If you did, you wouldn't tell them they can't get do anything to help themselves.

Hope, yes. But try to do something while you hope. There certainly is no harm in it. And who knows? Maybe the person's situation WILL get better because of it.