Herzberg Reading

The part where Herzberg stated that writing personal responses to community service experiences is part of processing the experience reminded me of what Professor Bower said in class that writing is important in that it makes you think and it organizes your thoughts into coherency. In order to really take in an experience, the mind needs time to digest and it does take mental effort to put it together so the information and purpose of the experiences makes sense and is clear.

I also completely agree with the article that it really is a never ending vicious cycle for the homeless and poor because of the nature of our capitalist system where only the strongest survives and thrives. The existence of the homeless is a byproduct of our societal values in equality because there will always be winners and losers in a competitive environment. Of course if everyone reaped equal benefits and rewards, then it would be the socialist system that America is against, opposite of what we pride ourselves in.

I think, yes, the most that we can do to alleviate this problem is to improve the conditions of the homeless by "helping them". However before we take that step, it is important that we should take the time to learn about their situations as individual stories, the factors that contributed to where they are now and gain insight to how this problem became so systemic and large scale, not just the problem of homelessness but our bias and society's negativity/ignorance/nonchalance towards them. This is where viewing them as equal partners come in, the model that Professor Bower and Murray is enforcing upon this class. It will definitely be an interesting experience for us to step out of this "ivory tower" to fight our preconceived notions and discrimination and to grasp the ability to take the same equality that we impose on social competition and apply that equality to our perception of the people who take part in that competition, whether they end up as winners or losers.