Five liberal excuses to do absolutely nothing
The person has been robbed and beaten. He’s bleeding on the side of the road. Unlike the Good Samaritan, we step over him. But we have really great reasons for why we do it.
1) We don’t want to put on a bandage, because we would not be fixing the deeper problems. I often hear this as a criticism of people who are actually doing the work of feeding the hungry. It is presented as an either/or. Either you can do the work of feeding people, OR you can advocate for larger policy changes.
Most of us don’t have power and access to change the political system. We can vote, protest and agitate, and that’ll take a couple of days out of the year. But we can give a guy a hot meal and listen to him. The hot meal doesn’t keep us from working on systemic problems. Listening and advocacy need to work together. Working for policy changes without personal interaction can be paltry and patronizing, and even disastrous.
