Editor’s Note: This letter is in response to Louis R. Avallone’s column in the April 16 issue of The Forum.
To this I might add the following: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime...” In other words, giving (caring) achieves short term relief. Teaching achieves life’s real goal – survival.
The other drawback to merely “caring” without constructive retribution -- the destruction of one’s ability to self-sustain. Consider feeding wild birds and other wild animals. The creatures become accustomed to finding or being given food. Should those sources be removed, those creatures that depended on that food will wander aimlessly in search of food in the wild, having forgotten how to survive on their own. Human, too, are pretty much the same as wild creatures. Most human were born with the basic ability to self-sustain. But those abilities can be suppressed, thus creating total dependency on other sources besides themselves. To avoid creating such dependency, consider this idea. Following the “Great Depression” of 1929 the country was, literally, on its knees. Below is one solution implemented by President Roosevelt in 1935, which did a lot for the country at that time, while helping those on federal assistance. The information was found website: www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/dustbowl-wpa/.
There is still so many work projects that could be instituted by the federal and state governments, using able-bodied persons on welfare and other federal and state assistance programs. Such would make the tax-payers feel so much better about paying for the large number of welfare recipients, currently sitting on their butts, thumbing their noses at them. If those people were working for their money in government-sponsored projects, they wouldn’t be quite so bold and so arrogant. But of course, such would never be approved, because it would destroy the famous “buy votes for money concept” very heavily favored by the by certain political elements. Making people work for their money would cancel the concept of buying those votes in exchange for government assistance of any type. Guess we’ll just have to weather this storm until we finally elect responsible, real American politicians at all levels of government -- if that’s possible. The national trend is to listen to rosy rhetoric’s, false promises, paying attention to candidate’s public and personal appeal, rather than one’s ability to lead and perform his/her sworn constitutional duties in the office elected to. As a result we have transformed a nation that used to be; strong, free, wealthy, had a robust economy for most of its existence, militarily strong, into a nation on the verge of total collapse, weak, socialistic, third world nation, with precious little or no freedom – with “leaders” more interested in gaining unconstitutional personal power, even shredding our constitution completely, than in the preservation of our free nation, thus pushing us deeper and deeper in that dreaded “black hole” that only a divine miracle will ever rescue us from – which is highly unlikely, since we’ve removed God from the country.
– Joseph Dardard
