Men’s News Daily, CA
Sept 11 2005
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Doing Away With The Poor

September 11, 2005

by Burt Prelutsky

It is alleged that when his ex-wife was asked to sum up William
Saroyan, famous for his heartwarming stories about Fresno’s Armenian
community, she replied, `Bill loved mankind, but he hated people.’
Knowing from firsthand experience how bitter ex-wives can be, I can’t
comment on the veracity of that rather pithy analysis, but I think
it’s a very appropriate comment when it comes to large numbers of
Democrats.

The specific group I have in mind includes several millionaire
members of the U.S. Senate, virtually every major figure in the
motion picture and popular music industries, and a slew of business
tycoons. The one thing all these muckety mucks have in common is they
only mingle with each other. They love mankind, but they hate poor
people. That’s why they live behind high walls and electric gates,
and travel everywhere in limos and private jets, generally
accompanied by extremely large men carrying extremely large guns.

When it comes to speaking at charity banquets and delivering
political speeches, the rich and famous will say all the usual
compassionate bilge about the poor and the downtrodden. But so far as
actually interacting with them, that’s strictly limited to the peons
who mop their floors, cook their food, mow their lawns, and look
after their kids. And, frankly, I don’t blame them. I mean, who the
heck really wants to hang around poor people? Besides not looking or
even smelling as good as rich people, they always want something. And
usually what they want more than anything is to be rich. That’s
exactly the sort of thing that makes wealthy people really nervous.
After all, it’s not their own kind who go around starting
revolutions, burgling their homes, kidnapping for ransom, or knocking
them on the head to steal their wallets.

So it is we have millionaires like Kennedy and Kerry, Edwards and
Feinstein, Boxer and Dean, trying to pass themselves off as
populists, yammering about raising taxes and soaking the rich, as if
they themselves were members in good standing of the lunch bucket
brigade. The odd thing is that so many poor people seem so willing to
go along with the gag. That can either be attributed to extremely
good manners or a naivete bordering on feeble-mindedness.

In any case, being neither rich nor poor myself, perhaps it’s no
surprise that, being in a position to view the problem objectively, I
have been able to come up with a surefire cure for poverty in
America.

I’m not sure if it’s this way in other parts of the country, but here
in Southern California, individuals and companies get to adopt a mile
or two of freeway. I’m not sure what their responsibility is,
inasmuch as the orange-vested clean up crews consist, so far as I can
tell, of bad drivers performing the community service portion of
their sentences, and not of Rosanne Barr or the gang at Morton’s
Mufflers. But I figure they must have kicked in a pretty penny in
order to get their names on those little highway signs. After all,
publicity doesn’t come cheap in this town.

Well, it struck me that if the well-to-do are willing to adopt a
stretch of the 405, why don’t they, instead, adopt the poor? Heck,
all by themselves, liberals like Ted Turner, Barbara Streisand and
George Soros, can afford to adopt every illegal alien coming across
the border. And what’s more, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream moguls Ben Cohen
and Jerry Greenfield can provide them with butter pecan and fudge
ripple until the cows come home.