Yeah. Actually, from that guy's perspective, given the actual situation, it is. He'll be sick, but he'll have a home and food, for as long as he lives - and if he was homeless, he might have died sooner than he will now, with AIDS but housed.
Either way, getting a stable living situation after you haven't had one is a tremendous relief.
I've lived in a poor neighborhood before. If you haven't, and clearly you haven't, then you have no freaking idea. I've never been that poor, because for me, you're right, there's always a job; I'm educated and white. But for this guy and for a lot of other people I've known personally, this simply IS NOT TRUE.
Even your blithe assumption he can relocate is naive. His situation might be worse than a dog's in a shelter, but at least he understands it. He knows the people, and may even have some family - even if his family hates him, they're still his people! You think this uneducated black man whose job history consists of getting fucked for cash is just going to pick up and move to North Carolina and get a nice Webdev gig surrounded by a bunch of strangers?
How about we take this the other way around. I'm assuming you're white. Let's say you relocate to the depths of Harlem or maybe the south side projects in Chicago, rent a place, and start going door to door looking for work. Is that something you can imagine working out well?
But be that as it may, there's not ALWAYS a job available if you're willing to accept a low enough wage and relocate. The fact that you believe this already means you simply have no expertise in being disadvantaged.
I have lived in poor neighborhoods. For a period of a few weeks I was unemployed, Because I had been a student I was ineligible for unemployment benefits and living in the woods in a tent. I went out and got a job washing dishes and got on my feet. Moved on to a bus boy gig. Then got a job doing tech support and paid my own way through school that was almost 10 years ago now.
So please don't come to me and tell me I have no idea what it's like to work my way up from rock bottom.
Willing to accept a low enough wage? There's a hard floor on that in most countries. Even ignoring minimum wage, there's a minimum amount of management overhead involved in having an employee, especially a low-wage, low-skill employee, and the value produced by a worker must at least overcome that even if he is to be worth hiring for free.
Willing to relocate? How about able to relocate? Moving to a distant land is a non-trivial exercise.
I seriously don't get your attitude in this thread. You're basically declaring that various serious problems in society are not, in fact, problems at all. According to you, as best I can tell, every single poor or homeless person out there has no obstacles to getting out of their predicament if they just did some obvious things like find employment. This leads me to ask: why do these people exist at all, then? Nobody wants to be poor, so if they can get out of it so easily, why are they still poor?
This is one of those instances where the mere existence of a problem indicates that it's hard to solve, while you're blithely proclaiming it to be trivial.
Maybe i should've used the term 'advantage' then. I simply wanted to point out that the ability to choose/reason is in itself very much something you 'inherit', rather than some innate skill that we all have equally.
