What Do You Deserve?

[anns_lace]

I saw a poster this week for a charity raising money for kids for the holidays. The headline read, "Don't these kids deserve Christmas gifts too?"

"Well no," I immediately thought, "why would they deserve gifts? Maybe they want gifts and maybe getting gifts would help make them happy. But deserve? No way! Nobody deserves gifts."

Then I began to think

Comments

[markmc03]

Everyone deserves dignity and respect so long as it is a mutual thing. No one is better than anyone else and I think it is a moral shame ... an utter moral shame that a few greedy bastards think they are entitled to everything at the expense of everyone else. It is a false measure to say that wealthy people work harder than anyone else. There is an inequality of opportunity. Some folks are luckier than others, to be born into wealth, to have some crazy idea that just happens to find a market, or they've obtained a windfall of one kind or another.

But the time is coming when everyone is going to face want, to face hardship. The poor will be the first to suffer, but there will also be a reckoning. The French Revolution was not without precedent.

And, after all is said and done, every last one of us meets death. I do not, however, believe in heaven or hell. Those are fictions created by the old religious powers to control the faithful.

[anns_lace]

In my mind, everyone deserves respect, but "dignity" is something we need to earn by our actions and the way we treat others.

Throughout history, there have been greedy bastards who take everything and impoverish others. They don't work harder than others; in fact, often they don't have to work at all!

The poor are always the first (and sometimes the only ones) to suffer. I don't think we've learned anything at all form past revolutions or wars, other than how to kill people better.

[markmc03]

We will have to agree to disagree on "dignity" then because I don't believe it has to be earned. You allow people to live their lives with dignity or you create the environment for discrimination and intolerance. Yes, there are those who abuse the system. But they are the exception rather than the rule. Unfortunately those awful few are used as an excuse to deprive the majority who are not awful. The welfare queen is an urban myth. Yes, there may be individual exceptions but they are the exception.