My two main sources of news since I’ve moved to the states from Ireland have been E! News and Fox News. This means I know exactly what Kim Kardashian is up to but I am also morally outraged by it. During a Fox News binge I stumbled upon a speech by Republican party member Marco Rubio. He spoke about Obama’s “class warfare” and how America has always been a country, not of haves and have nots, but of “haves and soon-to-haves.” I couldn’t agree more.
This iron-tight logic is best exemplified by the American homeless community.
In Europe, homeless people are a miserable lot. They just sit around being poor all day, without an entrepreneurial bone in their body. The US homeless population, however, are the so-called “soon-to-haves,” – they’re ambitious.
They put their European brethren to shame, scouring trash and pushing shopping carts full of stuff they’ve earned thanks to hard work and persistence. They know if they explore enough trash cans, they could be in Marco Rubio’s shoes in a year’s time. Homeless people in Ireland actually make no effort whatsoever to accumulate material wealth, they simply do not realize that they could be “haves”too.
Occasionally, I will give homeless people around Boston some loose change. It’s a joyous experience. You just know that your dollar is probably helping to fund some genius business idea they have been working on. It’s a little known fact that Mark Zuckerburg used to be a 48-year-old homeless man. Often too they will provide you a bang for your buck there and then. I can recall one lovable man of the street hailing a cab on my behalf as I exited a bar once. I of course tipped him 20 percent as I believe is custom in the homeless service industry. This is the great thing about American homeless folk, they give something back to the community. Their European equivalents are all take, take, take.
The homeless people of the United States also espouse that age-old, noble American attribute of politeness in the face of adversity. Even if they were to buy into this absurd notion that they are somehow a product of this country’s economic and political system, they at least have the decency to courteously ignore it. If I choose not to give them money, they still offer a “God bless you”that seems to say, “it would be churlish of me to be angry at your wealth. Had I only worked a little harder I could be you and your fine example of lack of charity inspires me to be all that I can be.”People often allude to the “blessed are the poor”parts of Jesus’ teachings but they neglect to reference his less well known end-note “but FYI – blessed are the people who don’t care about the poor also.”
Not that you see too many of the “soon-to-haves”around Northeastern though. We are the “haves”that are the “soon-to-have-more.”Occasionally you might get an email from Northeastern University Division of Public Safety about someone being shot around campus, but they assure us that the victim was a “soon-to-have”and not a “have”and we can breathe easy. Still a shame, I suppose, that they didn’t live long enough to reach have status.
People, let us stop this 99 percent talk. If I’ve learned one thing from Fox News it is never to trust these “statistics”or “facts”but rather to make my decision based on which side speaks the loudest. This is America, where the poor aren’t really poor – they’re just rich people in waiting.
– Greg McInerney can be reached at
[email protected].
