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Stunning Cruelty against the Homeless

Are businesses no better than my cat?

Shefali O'Hara
3 min readDec 18, 2021
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

When we lived in Brookshire, I fed the stray cats. I left small piles of kibble on a median strip in our apartment’s parking lot. My cat Snoopy never objected to this, but she protested when I put her leftovers out there.

I fed her cans of Fancy Feast twice a day. She never finished them. Rather than wasting that food, I’d give it to the strays.

Snoopy protested vocally at first. Then, she began to gorge.

It was obvious she was forcing herself to eat more, so that I wouldn’t have anything for the strays. She was being selfish. But, she was a cat.

When adult human beings are similarly selfish — it’s not cute. It can be dangerous, and people can die.

There are many examples of this. Greed, selfishness — these manifest in myriad ways.

In New York City, business owners objected to homeless people using the excess heat discarded by venting grates in front of office buildings. After all, the business was paying to heat their space, not to provide heat for vagrants.

This bothered me.

Would they rather people freeze to death during a cold New York winter? Because every year, that does happen. From 1996 to 2003, on average…

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Shefali O'Hara
Shefali O'Hara

Written by Shefali O'Hara

Cancer survivor, Christian, writer, engineer. BSEE from MIT, MSEE, and MA in history. Love nature, animals, books, art, and interesting discussions.

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