There's two things here I wish I could change though. One is the obvious. I wish there were no homeless, jobless people. It's hard to see people in need and not be able to help them. I wish I could do more.
The other thing I wish I could change is better displayed by the second picture. Let me tell you a story. My brother was a manager for a security company and i don't know the details but he met a man who used to beg for money on the corner of the street over by Walmart and McDonalds. He went to San Antonio, worked his butt off, and did a really good job selling. Halfway through the summer, he decided he didn't like working and made plenty of money on the street corner and left! He had a job, was doing well, and just decided not to do it. That makes me so upset! I couldn't even believe it when he told me.
The other picture there is just another way to show the same thing. This guy can code HTML but he doesn't have a job? Don't get me wrong, I know there are times when people have skills and there just aren't any jobs. But there's always something. It reminds me of the movie the Pursuit of Happyness. Will Smith's character did everything he could and had an incredibly hard time. I get that there are people that are trying. But the ones trying aren't sitting on a street corner asking for money. They're out there looking.
I also have a little experience from a different perspective. I used to work for a disability law firm and we had people calling every day asking for help to get money from the government. Now, some of those people that were calling were very legitimate and truely deserved help from the government. But we got calls like maybe once every other day. We had to ask very personal questions about their situations so we knew what they were doing and whether or not they were trying. Most people just didn't want to work. They wanted to get off as easy as possible.
Again, I'm not here to judge, and I still want to do everything I can to help those in need. I just wish there was something I could do to change the mind set of the people that just don't try hard enough.
OK, I'll get off my soap box. Ha. :)
Actually, we paid for Patrick (the man at the corner of walmart) to be flown to Dallas and live in a nice apartment there to sell. He did amazing, upsold hundreds of dollars every single sale. After TWO WEEKS, decided he didn't like his roommates or the work, and just stopped responding to our calls. At the end of the summer, we came back to Provo and found him begging for money at the same corner we found him at.
ReplyDeleteI totally know how you feel. Sometimes people need to willing to want to change themselves first. It is usually why they find themselves in those circumstances.
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