During the holiday weekend, Kate and I took a nice walk on the 3rd street Promenade in downtown Santa Monica, where we were immersed in the culture of a more well-off community. It is truly amazing to be in a community where there is such a visibly skewed dispersal of money. The town I come from (Shrewsbury, MA) is also an above-median household wage town, but visually, it would be difficult to tell that there is a large fluctuation of wealth throughout the town. Here in Santa Monica, I observe the differences on a daily basis.
I found quickly that I was very much unfamiliar with basically all of the stores in the plaza. They were clearly very high end designer stores that would make you think twice about entering, solely for fear of breaking something which would require a loan to repay. Walking through the Promenade, we stopped for some delicious frozen yogurt, which seemed to be the only affordable place to find anything in the plaza. To our surprise, we at last found a store which we recognized and felt half comfortable to explore: Nordstrom. We discovered immediately that Nordstrom was also out of our league, as a disgusting blue sports coat (which literally looked as though it had been worn for a decade and graciously donated to Good Will, where a Nordstrom employee scavenged it and knighted it with a $500 price tag for shits and giggles) proved to up-end our hopes of finding anything within our budget.
A five minute walk from the promenade will bring you to the Santa Monica beach front and Pier, where homeless people are scattered throughout the grassy areas among the palm trees. This type of difference in wealth is not noticeable in Shrewsbury, and I find it interesting to witness firsthand. There are countless times where I have consciously watched people driving every imaginable type of new convertible and sports car past people who are walking their belongings in a shopping cart to their next sleeping destination. This is by no means something I did not know occurred, but it is a lot more profound when you consciously experience it. On the other hand, I will now explain why I never donate things to these homeless people.
A few weeks ago, my co-worker Tim donated much of his lunch food to a homeless man who was sleeping on a bench near to where we were enjoying our work break. He suggested that I give my extra food to said homeless man. I didn’t. I understand that he is homeless, and probably doesn’t buy any of his provisions, but that does not mean that I should feel obligated to give the food which I worked hard to obtain to a man who is relaxing out in the sun and napping at noon. Upon further conversation with the man the next day, Tim discovered that this man chose to be homeless and has been so for 30 years. This leads me to an entirely different topic of why I feel so strongly against the workings of Social Security which this man will be able to suck from just for passing a certain age, but I will save that for a separate discussion…
My point is that it is obvious that there are drastic differences between the wealthy and poor which need to be bridged, but it’s hard to know where to start when you see poor people who choose to live that way, and rich people who think the size of their penis will be directly proportional to the amount of money they spend on material items. Where do we go from here?
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