What little I know...

I just spent two and a half hours writing an opinion paper on my proposals for welfare reform. This of course, is a useless paper because, as anyone who has ever studied social welfare for more than 10 minutes knows, barring a miracle, effective social welfare reform will never happen. Ever. What it boils down to is there are lots of poor people (for various reasons, various places of blame) and just not enough money. Nevermind that Americans spent a collective $8 billion + at retail stores on the day after Thanksgiving. So I take the money comment back. There is actually plenty of money. It's just a matter of what we do with it. The New Testament church had the right idea. They shared everything. People with more gave to the people with less and nobody lacked. Don't confuse this with socialism. In a socialist society, the government takes and distributes the money. In this NT community, the goverment didn't have to take, because people gave of their resources freely. If our entire country followed suit, we could have a utopic society, economically speaking. But is not going to happen, because we are selfish. I am selfish. I spend about $50 a month on coffee; enough to heat an elderly person's house for all of December. No matter how passionately I argue, the fact of the matter is that I don't require coffee for survival. Heat, on the other hand, is fairly important. And there are plenty of people who can't afford any this time of year. Anyhow, I have to get to class. The moral of this story is not to make you feel guilty about spending money on things you don't need (but if you do, that's your own issue, with your own conscience...haha) but just to say that when I'm a sociology professor, I won't force my students to write about "solutions" that they know aren't going to work anyway. I'll let them write about the depressiveness of hopeless situations, if they want. Haha.