The Deserving Poor. Who Are They? What is the Definition of Deserving?
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
I have been thinking about the meaning of these things since having my gift of a purely functioning recliner deemed unacceptable because of a patch and having a price assigned for a pickup. The lady who suggested the agency was heartening back some 15 years when the agency offered a pickup for used goods in the home. They didn’t have a competing pickup transfer service and offered to move things within the home gratis.
Thomas’s theory of the Definition of the Situation which required Zaniewski‘s aid to understand The Polish Peasant obliges me to find an intermediary beyond time. I choose any billionaire while settling for any multimillionaire. There was the recent Seattle incident where a man with a fake golden pass went all the way through a grocery and goods store, and was followed by a store guard who called local police, who in turn was surrounded by angry bystanders. The gambit is now abandoned by the parent company as too hackable. There was an incident in NYC where an angry black man simply filled a cart with food and drink and walked out of the store. He too was followed and the NYC police were called, this incident resulted in conflict between police and an angry mob with arrests and one shooting fatality. In my local supermarket, some homeless people have been walking out with goods and liquor defying intervention.
What can my advisors tell me? The poor are unwilling to be swept aside by taxation, the unavailability of jobs, the unavailability of medication, and medical attention. Strongman solutions being proposed that bypass or redefine constitutionality are buying into variations of replacement theory and bigger shares of the existing pie rather than making the whole enterprise bigger and fairer. For the elderly who are my particular concern, it means more caution on the streets to avoid assault and the utmost caution in obtaining assistance on the streets. There are cooperative consultations with available medical services and voting to maintain the insufficient but singular protections offered by the Constitution. Also, avoiding alcohol and drugs may help too.
