My response to the ignorance of my friends and neighbors

I hear a lot of people complain about the issue of homelessness in Vancouver, given the looming unpleasantness of the 2010 olympic games this issue has quickly become a hot button topic, and as such I hear many discussions about this problem on a day to day basis. Unfortunatley, a great many of the people I talk to in a day insist that social darwinism, or some unfounded aesthetic morality should permit us to let the homeless languish in their current state, or get a job and find a home. this picture is one that I feel is demostrative of the blatent ignorance in that statement; the man in this picture clearly works much harder than any of the people who have insisted to me that the homeless are homeless on account of laziness. The man in this picture is more of a modern day subsistance farmer, waking long before any of us have had our morning coffee, working untill it becomes too dark to find more bottles, in the hopes of scraping together enough money for a mcdonalds meal prepared by sombody who, though they have a job, probably still cannot find a place to live on the 8.50/hour they make working for their company. Just something to think about.