I realize this will be unpopular, but for crying out loud can we stop treating people who are receiving public assistance like they have the plague? It takes a lot of courage to ask for help; people value their pride over almost anything so think about that for a minute: the point someone breaks down and asks for help. The vast majority of people receiving public assistance don’t plan to make a lifestyle of it; the legend of the “Welfare Queen” is just that, a legend. Yes there are people who abuse the system but those are the convenient exceptions everyone likes to throw around. Some people started out with good jobs but then lost them due to illness. All it takes is one bad break to put most of us into a poverty situation. Think about that. We have more in common (and are financially closer) with the homeless guy on the street corner than we do with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Now let’s look at the REAL abusers of the system. Several of the top-grossing companies profit-wise did not pay any income tax for a four-year period. Many of these companies do not pay the average worker a fair wage; per an independent government study, a large number of Wal*Mart and McDonald’s employees receive food stamps and Medicaid. These are two of the most profitable American businesses, but they don’t pay their workers enough to get by without federal assistance. Wal*Mart especially has a habit of keeping hours below the minimum to get benefits through work, and to randomize schedules from week to week making it difficult for an employee to get a second job. Now, they are working on increasing hours to get more workers up to full-time, but still below what is considered industry standard.

If a company is making a large profit and yet the employees of said company are barely scraping by, there is something inherently immoral about the situation in my opinion. Where would any company be without its workers? One may argue that yes they create jobs but if workers are barely scraping by and have to rely on public assistance to eat and get health care, that is very nearly a feudal system – oftentimes, this takes place in areas that didn’t have access to a lot of variety of good, land was cheap so big box store moves in and hires people because the area is impoverished but they are not really helping. They get the bulk of their goods from overseas where labor is cheap, and push out the mom-and-pop store that was owned & operated by locals. The customers and the employees (oftentimes one and the same) are kept captive to some degree, if one cares to equate BigBoxStore with pre-Union labor camps. Send your kids to the Company School, owe your soul to the Company Store, stand at the junction still waiting for medicine – and no one will save you.

So be kind. Have some empathy; show some grace. You don’t know what someone else’s circumstances are. Think about how you would feel in a similar situation. “Well, I would do this” or “I would do that” – in the case of a homeless person, think about what’s needed to get a job. Address. Phone number. Work-appropriate clothes and access to hygiene facilities. Transportation.

EMPATHIZE. BE KIND. Those are the takeaways.