Yo No Home but Phones Though, So...

My oldschool little brick of a phone finally went kaput today after over two years. Now, with my family's verizon contract, I can get an upgrade free of charge for certain kinds of phones.
I've gone this long without a smart phone, but it looks like the only ones that are free or below thirty bucks are smart phones.

The cheap-looking flip phones? between 100 and 150 bucks easy. Now, I don't know the business reasons behind this and i don't really care too much.

However, the next time i hear or read someone goin off about "why all these homeless folks walkin round with iphones?" I can inform them based on actual first hand experience that a lot can change in one or two or however many years before your phone breaks.

Need a new phone and don't have much money for anything, well the contract you signed way back in the day says you can get this iphone 5c for free or this iphone 4s for 99cents or all this samsung for...well you get it.

Whether folks got a nice phone before their situations got as rough as you can see or they got it for free under a plan they've had for a long ass time (or whatever the situation because it's none of your business) it's not and has never been about some sort of irresponsible allocation of resources.

Those with affluence have always looked for ways to justify why others go without, and this tactic of pointing out the little that those on the bottom of society's food chain do have is purposefully distracting from real social ills.

If you have money, that does not mean that you are in any way better equipped to handle the responsibility of having money.
 
And speaking of smart phones, what kind of patronizing, hypocritical a-hole do you have to be to care more about a human being who is starving will do with your pocket change than what a multinational corporation will do with a huge chunk of your paycheck every month?

Do you really care more about how that guy might be lying to you—the one who politely asks if you can offer anything so he and his family might get some bread or water or tickets for a bus to a better town? Is that legitimately more important to you than the amount you hand over gratefully to corporations whose track records are well known to care so little for human life or worker's rights or the environment?

Because we know this isn't really about whether or not your quarter or your dollar bill goes to a sandwich or to booze.
 
It's a good excuse for a distracting tangential conversation about socially conscious macroeconomics and other bullshit we don't really care about while we sip our lattes. Maybe later we can smoke some pot and listen to covers of Pete Seeger and act like we give a damn about the world before Monday comes around and we head back to a job we hate but it pays the bills and for our xbox live gold membership.

Nah, what this is about is karma, plain and simple.

We still believe that we deserve the good stuff that happens to us while all the bad stuff is unjust.
 
We still believe that others most have done something to deserve the bad stuff that happens to them, while growing ever jealous of how all the good stuff happens to other people who don't really deserve it.

And on the off chance some real person could really use some real help, why bother, right? I mean, c'mon, some of "those people" have smartphones.