Weird that people are getting so caught up in giving a HOMEless man shoes rather than a home.
If this is what passes as noteworthy charity in minds of folks today, then we are worse off than I thought.
And more evidence for my positions in the private forums.
Feel free to go back to your ideological bandwagon now.
Why don't you go give a homeless man your HOME.
Feel free to pontificate from hypocritical perch now.
I do often.
Continue.
EDIT: And what I do is not relevant to this. It has to do with the ideological structure of "charity". Even my sharing my very small apartment with others is nothing. Personal charity gets us nowhere. And when doing something as small as handing out shoes is worldwide news, in a certain sense I guess it might good news as the petite bourgeoisie notion of helping the less fortunate has to come nearly to its end and perhaps we can move on to real solutions.
I'm sure you do. 
And now personal charity is "nothing".
You can't even acknowledge this simple act of kindness without disparaging it in some way reveals the heart of a true misanthrope.
I do.
Not fun when your assumptions are wrong.
But it doesn't matter.
And personal charity might matter in some momentary sense of benefiting both parties involved or at least the party "giving" something away as it allows them to return to their life of imbalanced wealth and assuage their conscience for living the way the do along the reality of the other they "helped".
Some people stop "doing charity" because the recipient wasn't "grateful".
The point here is, if personal charity and random acts of kindness worked, we would no longer need them by now.
And overly celebrating such moments (which I can tell from this thread must be INFREQUENT in your lives) do nothing other than make those with privilege feel good. (The situation is worse here, I didn't know this was some "viral" thing when I read here till I went out last for a little bit and everyone was talking about it.) Such "random acts" happen all the time (usually one poor person giving to another) and such moments serve as a fetishing moments when not only will where some people will not act out of principle or lack of ability, but because they have FELT they already have acted by having celebrated someone else's act.
This is how ideology and fetishism works. In this case, you could revisit the moment and feel good again and again I suppose. (With eventual diminishing returns.)
I've been on pretty much all ends of this charity business.
And the most helpful and effective acts of "charity" are large institutional acts of justice.
It is not charity. It is what is right.
The RCC is the second best organization in America in doing such acts. Really it is quite compelling what they do without all the "golly shucks" sentimentality.
And the American Government is the most effective agent of justice, again without much affective attachement.
The problem with the poor receiving justice, isn't that we don't love them enough, it is that we love them too much. (Love in the sappy pedestrian sense here.)
And the best manner for the such an inaffectual (if you will) and effective system to arise is through bureaucracy.
"Kindess" is lovely fleeting feeling people like to have once in a while. You can still have that. Let the technocrats take care of the heavy lifting though that really changes people's lives and often in fact saves them.
They will still be around for you to give their kids toys at Christmas or whatever makes people feel good.
Housing the poor ain't no feel good endeavor. Really love usually doesn't feel good, at least for those of us this side of sainthood.
$50 for some shoes. Easy.
Living with a mentally ill person and trying to help them get their life on track in American. Difficult to nearly impossible.
So each one of us can't do it, but we can create uncaring systems which do a better job at caring.
