On Bumming

God's grace is universal. He treats us all with dignity. While some people are just too lazy to get off of their butts to get a job, there are many who simply cannot find a job. My personal opinion is that you ought to seize opportunities. You can't just bum on the street, collecting money from the government, and doing nothing to support yourself. On the other hand, it's not always so easy to get a job. Further, people who try to get jobs while homeless are many times not in respectable clothing, social standing, or what would be considered a good condition for a job. If you don't give someone a job, how can you expect them to get one? When people walk by and say "Get a job, bum" they aren't helping. Rather, they are only entrenching the poverty the person experiences, as they force them to feel demoralized as a human being. To say "Get a job, bum" when you wouldn't accept them into the job.

The second point about those who are homeless is that of helplessness. We can say you should get a job and stop "bumming" but that doesn't allow for us to see the humanity in others. What would you do in that situation? Everyone has had a situation where they were hopeless, helpless and just wanted some help. By forgoing this person's humility and calling them a "bum," we fail to recognize both their humanity and our own.  We turn off an empathetic part of our mind in order to feel a bigoted sense of superiority from being able to say someone else isn't as good as us. But what is that temptation? Concupiscence. This is how we relate degrading others to sin. Degrading others and not respecting their humanity generally stems from us choosing to not recognize our equality in the eyes of God. When we do so, we violate others in a sinful temptation that causes us to degrade ourselves. By not recognizing our own humanity in others, we fail to fulfill the human condition of empathy.