How You Choose to Help the Poor Can Have Consequences that Hurt Them and Your City

Everyone with a heart wants to help the poor. That is a truly noble concept. It is HOW you go about it that determines whether you genuinely help the poor or just grow their numbers in your city.

We’ve all seen that analogy that goes around on Facebook that talks about putting out bird feeders to help birds in the winter. You start with one bird feeder but the number of birds grow so that you need another, and then another, and then another, ad infinitum to keep up with the birds that flock for the free feeding. And then you end up with the havoc they wreak — the inccessant chirping, the bird poop everywhere, dive bombing you in rage when you don’t keep the feeders filled. That truly translates over to the problems a city can face with their indigent programs if they offer the wrong kind of help.

There is help and there are hand outs. And that is a HUGE difference. Anywhere that offers hand outs — basically something for nothing — you exist in a set of circumstances and therefore you qualify… you WILL grow those numbers. They will only get larger, never smaller.

Why? Because, just like the birds in the above analogy, people will flock to those free offerings. The only change they have to make to their lives is location and many are constantly relocating anyway because they can’t make rent. So, they will go to wherever there is promise of something for nothing. Some are truly desperate people in desperate circumstance that appreciate the help during a low point in life. Others are free loaders that have no aspirations of changing anything and are out to get whatever they can with the minimum amount of effort. And just like the birds, they are happy until you can’t continue to meet their needs. When you fail to rise and continue to maintain the flock you have cultivated, they will turn on you and your city with a vengeance of entitlement. You will never win with the something for nothing programs.

Many people feel good about “helping" the poor. It is a source of pride and a hit to the feel good spot in their brain. Others massage that feel good spot buying a new pair of shoes. Both people feel better about themselves.Which one is selfish? Actually both.

Each one is motivated by personal satisfaction. Each one is serving self more than others. The second is more straightforward about their personal satisfaction fulfillment. They aren’t attempting to fool themselves or anyone else with their actions.

The first however, is fooling themselves with a false sense of aiding the less fortunate. In actuality, they are maintaining and growing poverty for personal satisfaction. The poverty programs that do nothing to elevate people and instead keep people trapped with no way up and out is like a trap to collect the poverty stricken. Then the people who made the programs strut in circles thumping their chests about how much good they are doing. Meanwhile the people they are getting their buzzing about are still living and sleeping in abject poverty. Nothing is fixed. Living, breathing people have become someone else’s pet project to provide themselves a warm fuzzy feeling.

Does that mean we should do nothing? No. But we should find a way to do more than just maintain people in poverty. We need to create programs that help people elevate. We need to help them believe there is a better way to live and provide them a path to SELF SUFFICIENCY. Until we do, we are merely treating the poverty stricken like pets to be cared for.

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Originally published on Medium.com

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