<p>Try - journal it. Give unconditionally and write down how you felt after. Then take without needing and write down how it made you feel.</p>
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<p>Oh my God I absolutely hate it when people assume that we live in a fair world. If you think that opportunity is offered equally to everyone, you’re being humorously naive.</p>
<p>I thought this was going to be about giving presents to friends. Which I like.</p>
<p>^^ We live in massively unfair world. But almost never is a person forced to become a drug addict. Any anyway if you were born in America then you’re already on the positive side of the world’s unfairness.</p>
<p>Drugs = escapism. They are almost always an effect of poverty, not a cause.</p>
<p>^Yes, but one could get OUT of poverty. Instead of just wasting the little money one does have on drugs.</p>
<p>But not everybody is able to respond to such a challenge in a positive way. Imagine if you were thrown on a battlefield and told to fight for your country. Would you be able to do that, or would you end up cowering behind cover screaming for your life?</p>
<p>It’s not quite the same thing, but both situations are very challenging and create a lot of despair. Not everyone has enough courage to respond in the right way.</p>
<p>EDIT: I’m only talking about the druggies. Others do whatever they can to get out of poverty, but it doesn’t always work. Prostitution, working two jobs, etc are all very common, yet some people just aren’t lucky enough to escape poverty.</p>
<p>I’d much rather be the rich person donating clothing to a homeless shelter than the homeless guy getting donated clothing from the homeless shelter.</p>
<p>Somehow I think I misunderstood the question…</p>
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<p>Probably not, and it would be my fault if my cowardice led to my town getting burned.</p>
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<p>The process of becoming a drug addict as an upper middle class person is the same as becoming a drug addict as an urban lower class kid. Social class and context matters. While no one may be stabbing you with heroine needles, the urban poor are still far more likely to resort to drugs, and it’s not because they’re all unmotivated idiots.</p>
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<p>One just doesn’t “get out” of poverty by properly allocating one’s income. Let’s say that 70% of a lower class worker’s paycheck goes to necessities. That leaves 30% of a very small income left for consumer spending and saving. That means less money for private schooling, private tutoring, activities like Boy Scouts and things requiring money, books for personal reading, and a host of other things that would allow one to rise above one’s social class. Not to mention that you probably have less time to devote to studying, seeing as you’re probably working a full-time job as well. </p>
<p>You don’t just take up drugs just because you’re bored. You spend years and years and years in the ghetto, molded by a culture that values toughness and street respect, finding very little help from a school often filled with incompetent teachers and administrators. You probably have no proper role models, seeing as you probably live in a single-parent household, with a parent who is never home due to working/drugs/whatever. You can get robbed, rape, and shot any moment. The only help you actually get is from your peers, and seeing as the code of the streets values surviving the now over preparing for the future, you don’t get much help for that. If they’re not getting help from anyone, you can’t just assume that people have an intrinsic knowledge of “how to move on up;” in fact, even relatively affluent students here on CC are quick to complain when their GCs won’t help with something as relatively straightforward as college applications. Opportunities to move up are often simply denied or unknown to those in the lower class, and because of that they turn to drugs because they see no other escape.</p>
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Some people can get out of poverty, but the capitalist economic system is such that there must be so many more poor people than rich people, to prop the system up, like a pyramid. As people increase in wealth, others decrease in wealth, as per the relative scarcity of wealth. Thus, it is better for the rich to decrease in wealth to facilitate an increase in wealth of the poor, as opposed to the opposite.</p>
<p>You seem to assume that all (or most) of us that are poor in the US are drug addicts. It’s as if you are just creating straw men to attack, as opposed to seeing what actually is. The cycle of poverty traps people there, and those who do drugs and are homeless have been failed by society. Social programs need to treat the addicted and house the homeless. Not just homeless shelters, unsafe and not numerous enough, but actual homes for them. If we are to hold true the right of the people to life, and the duty of government to provide for that right, we must see that the right to life entails the rights to all things necessary to the continuation of life, including food, water, shelter, safety, and health, and the government’s duty to provide for these rights.</p>
<p>So yes, society has failed the homeless thus far.</p>
<p>^ I think that the context that person was talking about was that we shouldn’t give money to people that are just going to spend it on drugs. If we have money to give away, we should give it to people who will actually use it to better themselves.</p>