<HTML><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff" STYLE="font:10pt verdana; border:none;color:#000000; background-color:#ffffff; "><DIV>Pat writes:</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>>Of all the silly answers...I am poor, twit! The only bitterness I feel is that of a regular tax payer who is >having their hardearned pay sucked into programs for the 'poor' with no end in sight. I can assure you >there are many more programs to 'help' the poor (that do not much more than keep them poor) than >there is for the middle class barely able to make ends meet for helping those poor souls. As to my >faith, your comments are the ones of someone who knows nothing about it. I use the word ingrate >because any time these migrant workers protest anything they wave the Mexican flag in our faces. >Well, go back to Mexico if its so great! Try reading "The Enemy Within" by Donald Savage. You just >might learn something to make you think more deeply about this subject. It is as always multi-faceted.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>You're poor, are you? Unemployed, living in your car, no health insurance, and well past the two-year lifetime limit on Idaho's notoriously parsimonious family assistance program? Or was that you I saw on TV with Sally Struthers, shoeless in the slums of El Salvador? If you have a car that runs, food to eat, a job to go to, health benefits, and, dare I say it, fifteen bucks a month to blow on a First Step Internet account, then you are not especially well acquainted with skid row. Hell, if you have only one or two of these things, you're better off than 99% of the world's population. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Perhaps your life has been hard. Perhaps it's been tight and squeezed and not all that you'd hoped it would be. If so, then you have my sympathy, but it's a limited sympathy. It's bounded by the knowledge that your experience has failed to make you compassionate; instead, you're hard-hearted, bitter, bigoted and unpleasant. A lot of us grew up poor. We lived on generic brand macaroni and cheese, we shopped for school clothes at the Goodwill, and there were months when we couldn't afford to pay both the electric bill and buy gas for the car, so my mother walked the miles to work. But there were people worse off than we were back then, and there are people far worse off now. What I want is for those people to be better off. I want their kids to have access to education and not be forever trapped in grinding, soul-destroying, endless poverty. I want them to have free school breakfast and free school lunch, a decent place to live, a stable home life, and access to public education. When they get to college, I want them to have Pell grants and guaranteed student loans. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I'll go a step further -- I want the poor today to have access to programs and assistance that weren't available to me when I was growing up. I want there to be more programs to lift people out of poverty, not fewer. I want to erase the damage done during the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II eras and pick up the threads of the Great Society. No one in this rich country should be going to bed hungry; no one should be without housing or health care. Faith, hope, and charity abideth, and the greatest of these is charity.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>A few months ago, Pat, you told the members of this list that you had benefited from George W. Bush's tax cuts. Bully for you. You can be grateful for that, and also for the fact that you make enough money that the federal government has deemed that some small amount can be "sucked" from your tight, screaming, Krusty Krab wallet and used to provide paltry assistance to those who can only dream of being in your tax bracket. And, if you can't be grateful, then you might remind yourself that there's someone in Rwanda or Sudan or Bangladesh who'd be happy to take your place.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Sincerely,</DIV> <DIV>Squidward (AKA Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment)</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>PS: If I had Michael Savage's "Enemy Within," I'd increase my intake of fiber. Strong black coffee, a copy of People magazine, and a little alone time with Mr. Commode . . . that's what Michael Savage needs. </DIV></BODY></HTML><br clear=all><hr>Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : <a href='http://explorer.msn.com'>http://explorer.msn.com</a><br></p>