The new lepers

A new Silicon Valley startup wants to help good rich people avoid bad poor people while traveling.

While Silicon Valley brims with brilliant overachievers, its intense inward focus can make for a rather cramped view of the world. Think "satire" that cruelly pokes fun at San Francisco's homeless population, or very serious (and very real) experiments that suggest a homeless man's life could be changed for the better with a few coding lessons.

Today, that worldview was manifested in a startup called Ghetto Tracker, which purports to alert rich travelers to the locations of a city's poor people so they can be avoided. (Ghetto Tracker has since been renamed "Good Part of Town," which does nothing to change its intended purpose.)

The startup's mission is every bit as tone-deaf as one would expect from such a one-percent endeavor. "We use a rating system that allows locals and people familiar with area rate which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe," reads the site's self-ascribed purpose for existing.

This company felt there is a viable market for products that help customers avoid neighborhoods where people might be poor. It is a natural progression from rich business folk and politicians making the poor a scapegoat for the slow economy along with taxes and regulations. This trash talk even comes from people that call themselves followers of Christ, especially when running for public office. The politicians elected by money from the rich are quick to falsely accuse the poor of being liars, cheats, and morally defective. There is a very corrupt and evil mindset sweeping America in the 21st century.

What is your obligation to Christ to stop this toxic attitude toward the less fortunate? Read the gospels carefully. Jesus went among the forgotten and marginalized to share God's love for them. He also healed their physical, psychological, and spiritual ills. What Jesus did is the antithesis of what we see in America today. We live in a country where the poor have become targets of hatred instead of love. I assume the Lord would expect us to follow His ethics instead of what passes for ethics among the privileged.