Pretentious Philanthropy, by Q. Reyes – Artistic Warfare #93
I’m sitting at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro Stations waiting on the train to go watch a boxing match in Hollywood. The irony is that there are more, and better boxing matches around here for free.
If you’ve never been around MacArthur Park (Los Angeles, Ca) at night, I’ll try to explain it as best as I can.
Okay, think of Disneyland. Now remove all happiness from Disneyland. Then replace all the Disney characters with thugs, drug dealers, gang members and a prostitute here and there. Now you’re in Macarthur Park.
Why am I even bringing this up? Because I can’t believe that this day in age in America we have so much struggle and suffering right in front of our noses. Every time I walk through this place I feel like its a third world country, and that’s no BS.
Yeah, we send money to Africa, we try to help in Tibet… But what about right here at home? Why do we step over a homeless guy to put a check in the mail to help a kid in some other country?
I know many countries need our help, and we should help them. But what about our own country? We need help ourselves!
Great. So Brad and Angelina adopt kids from all over the world and give them a great life. What about adopting a kid from Compton? Why are they any less important?
Oprah builds a school in Africa, meanwhile we can’t hire competent teachers to teach right here in LA.
Fuck philanthropy and charity. If you want to help get your own hands dirty. Don’t pay someone to do some shit and then you get the credit for it.
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February 6th, 2011 at 11:55 pm
Me like!
February 7th, 2011 at 8:25 am
If you added it all up, the public and philanthropic money put into just LA (or my city, NY) would far exceed the total the USA sends abroad. Compared to our size, our nation is behind the curve on our responsibility to our neighbors.
Problem isn’t overseas but in ourselves. What we’re spending over here isn’t enough, wherever you live.
Wherever you live, the streets are crumbling underneath the very wheels of the commuters.
Wherever you live there are homeless downtown you can see and everywhere else where they’re harder to see.
When we need medical care, wherever we life we can go to the emergency room and beg.
My enemy is some starving, dying black man in Africa or Haiti? I should get up in his face when my city leaves a park to the weeds and the homeless? I should shake him upside down and take what comes out back to America to build a shining city on the hill?
“Ha ha ha,” laugh the plutocrats-in-charge. “The little folks are fighting amongst themselves again. Did you see that collector car prices are bouncing back?”
February 7th, 2011 at 10:55 am
Keu,
Now THIS rocks. Muy bueno, hermano.
@ John T. Completely on point, man. Respect.