Word: beggar
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...front of J. August. He wrote about begging, panhandling, those that do it--and he used her as an example. We have all seen her, we have been asked for change by her, and most of us, at some point in time, have found the idea of an obese beggar amusing, if not counterintuitive. Maybe she is fat because she eats fast food. Maybe she has a glandular problem. Maybe there is some evil capitalist socioeconomic principle at work and we are all in danger. I don't care. Tell it to your gov section...
Hicks writes, "And speaking of not making sense: an obese beggar? Am I missing something here? It is a combination as foreign as a keg-standing priest or a thought-provoking Core section." He appears terribly eager to display his ignorance regarding the prevalence of obesity among the poor...
...homeless in Harvard Square. Beyond his ignorance on homelessness (which I won't address here), his contempt for obese people is downright disturbing. Hicks comfortably uses this woman's weight as a point of ridicule and a "fact" to disqualify her neediness. Hicks' snide confusion over an "obese beggar" demonstrates total ignorance about the nature of obesity and poverty. Hicks (an economics concentrator) is "missing something here." It's more expensive to be thin than fat in America today...
...guess the lesson is that if you're going to be a beggar in Cambridge, the assistance you'll receive will be related not to how much you actually need it, but how much of a swell, likeable person you are. And how long you've been at it. Or am I wrong...
...think that the greatest example of casual, social cruelty I can imagine is laughing at a sincere love letter. It is the moral equivalent of knocking change out of the hand of a beggar: a pointed and cynical response to declared vulnerability. What prompts us to mock sentimentalism in the public sphere--what makes it morally acceptable to make fun of Celine Dion's music, for instance--is the suspicion that such music is itself a form of cynicism, a manipulation of America's overwhelming urge towards the saccharine. You get the sense that when Dion and her kind...