Upper Class Blindness

In America, we do not like to see poor people.  We do not want to see homeless people.  We do not want to see people living in poorly maintained low income housing.  We would prefer not to see the hungry.  So, what do we do about it?  Evidently, we try to hide it.  Within the last year, at least 21 U.S. cities have passed laws forbidding the feeding of homeless people in public.  Some cities have replaced park benches with new models that include separators designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them.  Businesses have placed obstacles on sidewalks to make sitting on them painful, to deter the homeless from loitering near their stores.  In many cities, construction projects have been approved that destroy or renovate low income apartments to become classy higher income housing.  In some cases, low income housing has been replaced in response to higher income residents that live nearby, who feel that the nearby low income housing damages their property values and forces them to see things they would rather not.  In the U.S., our solution to our discomfort at seeing poor people is to create laws to drive them away.

This is a major ethical problem.  We have plenty of poor in the U.S., and the number is only increasing.  Hiding the problem is not fixing it.  All of these laws and other solutions are actually making the problem worse.  Now, hungry homeless people are being forced to starve, because they cannot be fed where they are, and they have nowhere else to go.  Tearing down low income housing is putting more people on the streets.  Perhaps the worst part, though, is that all of these efforts to hide the problem are making it less obvious, which makes it easier to ignore the suffering.

There is a solution.  It is a painful one, and the upper class will certainly be opposed to it.  It needs to be done though.  The problem has been ignored for so long that there seems to be no other reasonable way.  First, I think we need an amendment to the Constitution offering Federal protection for the poor.  No law should be allowed to persist which is designed specifically to discriminate against the poor.  When a city tries to enact a law designed to hide the fact that the city is tolerating the pain and suffering of its poor, Federal courts should have the legal backing to come down hard on that city.  Building projects designed specifically to relieve the rich from the burden of seeing the suffering of the poor should also be shut down.  In fact, the truly ethical city would deliberately zone such that every large, expensive house looked out at cheap low income housing.  The homeless shelter should be right next to the highest income mansion.  The soup kitchens should be right across from the country clubs.  Not only should it be legal to feed the homeless right out on the streets where they live, it should be encouraged to feed them in prominent locations where the rich can observe, and the right to feed them in those places should be legally protected.  The point of all of this is that the people with the greatest capacity to improve the situation should be the people who have the greatest exposure to the problem.  Yes, this will be very emotionally painful.  It should be.  Imagine the pain and suffering of those poor people.  If we think we cannot bear to feel at least a part of their suffering, we deserve to feel the full impact of their fate for ourselves.

Upper class blindness needs to be cured.  If this requires the poor to be shoved in the faces of the rich, then this is what needs to be done.  Perhaps if the rich were forced to realize what their money games are doing to our nation's poor, they would think twice about how their business deals and profit strategies might be causing harm to others.