[Don Jones]

A one time act of kindness like that lasts as long as the shoes don't wear out.

Not so. An act of kindness lasts a lifetime in the mind. While you presume to know the inside of people’s minds (read below) I am certain of one thing: the homeless man with new shoes will never forget this act of kindness for as long as he lives. Neither will the do-gooder blond guy. Memory is as important, more important really, than material possession.

As an atheist and materialist I might agree with your opening conclusion, but read or re-read the very end of The Brothers Karamasov where Alyosha, in his “Speech by the Stone,” urges the wayward schoolboys to remember the act of kindness they have demonstrated by visiting the grave of their dead friend. Acts of kindness outlive their practical effects because it is the attention directed by love toward another that lives on via the memory. In fact, the act of kindness at the end of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece has no material effect at all. The friend is dead!

Rather than that, why don't people admit that they would never consider working beside the likes of such a lowlife.

Huh? Presumably, since you seem to know this person, the poor man is unfit for employment so, as your logic seems to imply, we wouldn’t want someone like that in the office or factory or phrontisterion.

Not saying he is [a lowlife], just stating the obvious thoughts that must go through the heads of people who do the easy act of charity.

You are saying he’s a lowlife. Your just wrote it above.

You must be clairvoyant to know and state what obviously goes on in the head of the do-gooder blond guy. But by observing behavior we can glean to a certain reliable extent the contents of a human brain. That said, I do know that a lowlife to you was a human being to the do-gooder. Easy act of charity? If so, then remove thy shoes on the street and give them away.

Else why didn't he go further and invite the guy into his car for a vegan meal in an expensive restaurant, discuss Proust, and find him a position of employment where he works.

A deeply cynical remark. As if the act of kindness on the part of the blond guy was really not at all useful. Yet, as stated above, practicality in an act of kindness is not the point, really.

Why bother to relieve suffering, even a little bit, if we can’t address the entire situation that brought it about? Both the political left and right have failed to heal the world of poverty and destitution but that shouldn’t preclude an act of kindness. Sometimes that’s all we got to give.

I'm no better than the blond guy either, by the way, and probably less giving, but I don't delude myself.

From what I’ve read the blond guy is better than you. Or maybe you’re having a bad day.

Listen, I know we'll probably never be able to salvage more than half the lives of the homeless, seeing that many are mentally ill. Certainly the insane should be in institutions, but hey, that would be cruel and unusual, wouldn't it folks?

If hugging someone who has been kind to you is a sign of insanity then I’m also crazy.

Just let them be themselves, no matter how self or outwardly destructive they are.

The do-gooder bond guy did let the poor man be himself. He wasn’t trying to change him. He expressed an act of love towards him.

The others we see are those that have given up on life, and the rest, slackers. I think at least the former have some shred of hope, but a pair of shoes ain't gonna do it.

We never really know in a catch-all understanding what may lead people to be homeless. There but by the grace of chance and choice go you, or I.

And no, the communist mantra of "Each to his ability, each to his need", ain't gonna do it. It doesn't work in Eratosphere, so why would it in the larger society.

I don’t know what this means. Eratosphere is certainly a product of brute capitalism for positive ends. Alex Pepple, whatever his politics which I don’t presume to know, is an entrepreneurial dude who set this whole thing up. By the way, have you given some money to Eratosphere to keep things running? We are all investors in this website so we should all voluntarily pay up – whether $5,000 or $5. It’s all good money after good.

Gorbachev saw the failure of that belief over the years as he slowly realized that the manufacturing base of the Soviet Union was consistently fabricating inferior products which no one, not even his own citizens, wanted.

This wins the award for greatest non-sequitur to date.