Posted on 10/15/2009 9:14:42 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Recent disclosures about certain questionable practices at ACORN, the left-leaning nationwide community advocacy organization, have raised questions about the organization's very legitimacy.
But as ACORN rightly moves to get its house in order and restore its credibility, it might be worth taking a few moments to ask some other questions, not about ACORN but about ourselves, and our commitment to lifting up the millions of our fellow Americans who live in a netherworld of poverty, hopelessness and victimization.
You cannot understand the ACORN videos (understand, not condone), without making some honest effort to understand this netherworld in which ACORN and too few other hardy, modern day missionaries work to improve the lives of people most of us never see and never want to see.
Wasn't it odd that so many ACORN workers hardly blinked an eye when a woman identifying herself as a prostitute showed up in their offices ostensibly to ask for guidance on how to buy a house? It's as if such people - prostitutes, people with substance abuse problems, young men with criminal records - show up at ACORN offices all the time asking for help.
Crazy, no? Or maybe that's what ACORN does. That and helping high school dropouts prepare for a job, building affordable housing for single mothers, signing kids up for health insurance, counseling homeowners facing foreclosure, and encouraging every American to exercise their right to vote. The uncomfortable truth is that tens of millions of Americans live the kind of lives where the availability of help from groups like ACORN is the difference between having food on the table or not, having a roof over their heads or not, seeing a doctor or not, and having a voice in the political process or not.
Which is crazier, we should ask ourselves: that there is an organization like ACORN that tries to counsel people in dismal circumstances so that they too might find a way into the middle class, an honest life, a clean life? Or that so many desperate people still live in our country, side-by-side with us, but almost completely invisible to us?
We know who is there to counsel those on the other end of the economic and social spectrum - the super wealthy instead of the super poor - on their schemes to avoid taxes, defraud stockholders and cheat taxpayers. Oh, the lawyers and accountants and bankers were fawning over Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay and John Rigas and Dennis Kozlowski and AIG and ... the list goes on and on.
But even the lives of middle-class Americans are light-years - light-years - away from the void in which the entrenched poor live. I can walk into any Chase bank, where I've had an account since graduating college (even when I had $10 dollars in it, I still had an account), produce three years' worth of tax returns, a driver's license, a birth certificate, a passport, you name it, and get all the counseling I need on how to take out a home loan. I would probably even leave with some viable options for financing, despite these difficult times.
Who will counsel the people working in the back of our favorite restaurant, on the construction site around the corner, working off the books without health insurance, overtime, pensions or even the promise of receiving Social Security after a lifetime of labor?
I'm rooting for ACORN to right itself, as it is aggressively moving to do, because for me the biggest question is this one: if not ACORN, who? Who will counsel and advocate for the "other half," whom Jacob Riis shone a light on over a century ago, that great swath of society which today occupies that same netherworld of poverty, hopelessness and victimization?
Understanding that world is the key to understanding ACORN, and why ACORN is such a vital organization for so many Americans.
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Rory Lancman represents the 25th District, comprising part of north central Queens, in the New York State Assembly.
LOL! Love the title! Maybe the commies would support us... Oh wait, that ideology wen bankrupt in the 1960s and again in the 80s. I guess ACORN will just have to make sure no one takes them down.
Uhh, their relatives.
I mean, really,....who’s going to take care of the tax-dodging pimps who want to exploit 13 year old girls?
How about you don’t have 8 kids you can’t afford. Then you’re helping yourself.
Churches? Relatives? Salvation Army? St. Vincent de Paul? Red Cross?
Is it really so surprising that lawbreakers wouldn’t bat an eye when other lawbreakers come in to ask for help breaking the law?
Any mob boss could handle the job.
Well there you have it: poor people (especially minorities) are too stupid to take care of themselves.
That’s why they need liberal Democrats and corrupt organizations that aid liberal Democrats.
Duhhh, I dunno, Rory. Were they keeling over in the streets before ACORN came along??
Oh my. Just because they are poor, it makes it all ok.
Who? Not Acorn, they lost their right to help when they showed they believed that stealing from the public was an OK practice. When instead of getting these pimp/prostitutes the real help they needed to go straight, they felt the best thing to do was to support pedophilia, child abuse, tax evasion, and immigration offenses.
As an organization, Acorn has neither moral nor legal nor ethical conscience. That means they can cannot be trusted with our money or to even truly help anyone other than themselves and their crooked cronies. That this clown is even thinking about arguing in their favor shows a severe lack of judgment on his part.
The churches and local government should handle who takes care of the people in their locality. The federal govt’s support of a nationwide community organization should end.
Now that the light is being shown on the cockeroaches of ACORN, Americans are only just realizing the hornets nest of extremism that is festering in many urban areas. Hearing the rants of Rev. Wright, the marxist tripe of Anita Dunn, and the communist insanity of dozens of wackjob appointees have wakened Americans from their stupor.
ACORN’s not watching out for them now so what difference would it make.
Outfits like ACORN keep the “poorest of us” in the poor house.
If nobody did everything for them and paid their way they would get up off their dead asses and make something of themselves.
The poor are only used as mascots for these control freaks’ self aggrandizement - modern day secular pharisees the lot of ‘em.
This clown would paint Judas as a saint...
How about the churches and the private homeless charities you see on every corner in every downtown in America? Or... how about they help themselves by getting up off their fat Twinkie butts, turn off the TV and get a job.
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