Poor is the New Black

A while back I wrote yet another of thousands of worthless posts on Xmastime an essay for the New Yorker on Poverty, which included this:

While leading a life absent of opulence and excess may be virtuous, I do not see how elbowing your way into the threadbare supplies of the poor is. And I see this everyday; I live in a fuckwad neighborhood wherein trust fund kids think it's "cute" or "ironic" to pose as homeless people on the street, begging for food. And what has this accomplished with me on a personal basis? I give exactly NOTHING to anybody on the street, since I've become accustomed to thinking "fuck you, you're rich and don't need a fucking dime." And I assume I'm not the only person thinking this. Of course, every time I do this I may be saying fuck you to a REAL homeless person. Which sucks. So while I greatly applaud HELPING the poor, I see no virtue in PRETENDING TO BE poor.

Then just now I read THIS ARTICLE.

There is nothing in it that makes me believe these are not young kids with rich daddies who would welcome them home the minute they got bored pretending to be (insert bohemian city scrappy drug hero here.) Which, as I said, obscures any real homeless/poverty problem that may actually exist. Leave it to Williamsburg to fuck up poverty by trying to make it cool. Awesome