Tired of the Haterz

It seems every time there is an article on helping the homeless there are haters spitting and shaking their fists in the comments.  Facts mean nothing to some people.  Although I will admit sometimes it is difficult to know what the real facts are.  It’s a little like the Bible–everyone picking passages that support what they want to believe, ignoring the rest.

“If you check the data, you will see that your so called “righties” are the overwhelming majority of the ones that are supporting those folks that were either too lazy or incapable of getting an education or a job. Stop blaming society for all their ills. We had nothing to do with it. If you feel so energized about their plight, call Obama…he’s worth millions, most of which was absconded from the taxpayer starting in his teenage years.”

The comment above refers to checking the data, but seems to imply in their conclusion that ring wingers pay the majority of taxes since taxes provide social services.  But data is not mentioned at all in the statement that people “were either too lazy or incapable of getting an education or a job.”  Show me the survey that confirms the majority of homeless people are lazy or stupid.

I wish every one of these haterz could be required to spend a month volunteering with the people they condemn without knowledge.  If they come out of the experience feeling the same way, then at least they would have some legitimacy to their views, and proof that compassion means nothing to them.

State officials and those who advocate for the homeless say there is an alarmingly large population of so-called unaccompanied homeless young people, ages 14 to 22, living on the streets and in shelters across Massachusetts. The figure is growing, and too big to get a grasp of because homeless teenagers often hide their plight, and go uncounted, advocates say.

via Homeless teens seen as growing problem across Massachusetts | masslive.com.

The Good Old Days

The article below specifically refers to reading and how people claim the internet and television has caused an illiterate society which no longer reads.  I think the subject goes far beyond that.

I’m as guilty as the next person of waxing nostalgic about “the good old days.”  I still think the love children of my youth were headed in the right direction with their Make Love, Not War signs.  I love reading historical novels and often wish there were time machines so I could visit other times and places.

But when I really stop to think about it, there were no good old days.  Do we really want to go back to the fifties, often held up as idyllic, forgetting the McCarthyism and nuclear paranoia? The twenties may have had happy flappers but it also had prohibition, and no equal rights for women or blacks.  Any decade you point to, you can find both good and bad things we left behind.

Even when we humans have the right idea (wouldn’t the world really be a better place if we had all evolved into flower children?) tons of wrong ideas happen at the same time.  Can you name a time in the past when everything  was better off than we are today?  If you can, does everyone else feel the same way about it?

Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens…..read more

via The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic.