Dan,
Could you flesh out your query please? Not sure I get your intent.

Thanks.

Makes sense, Gregor. But you're still working and contributing. :)

The issue isn't whether they are human, but humane. One doesn't equal the other. Sad, but too true.

Thanks for the thought-provoking question, Aunt Sam.
Epicurus said that the ingredients we need to feel that life is worth living are "friends, freedom and and an examined life." (These words were, of course, spoken by a man who happened to own a house without a mortgage, who had the means to put food on the table, etc., but his essential point rings true, at least to me.)
I think what he was really saying is that we need TIME to feel satisfaction in life. Because without it, we have no opportunity to share experiences with friends, or to explore outside interests, etc. and certainly no opportunity for the kind of reflection that is necessary to develop and maintain a personal code of ethics.

But, WW, you may protest, all very interesting, but how does this ramble tie into my question about helping others?

Here's how, Aunt Sam, but let me know if you disagree:
1)Job Sharing. I'd be delighted to job share, which I think is a really positive idea.
Someone without a job gets one, and thereby immediately increases his, or her stability; and the person who had the full time job to begin with immediately gets more time for whatever. Job sharing strikes me as a genuine win/win/win; the employer also benefits from this arrangement, as employees are surely more focused and productive when they are stimulated by outside interests and more physically rested.
The hitch to job sharing in America is, of course, health insurance. Most employers in America do not offer health insurance at all to personnel they categorize as being part-time. How, then, under the current system,can two unrelated people share one insurance policy? If we could fix that, by passing universal health care legislation, then job sharing would take off in no time.
2)Resource sharing. The downside of job sharing is less income per person. But I think that we can compensate for that if we are willing to adopt the principle of sharing as a way of life:
a) Housing. As Vance Packard said, a long time ago, in his book, NATION OF STRANGERS, we've lost the cohesion and mutual support we had as a society when people stayed put, sharing houses or living across the street from family and friends, or at least living in the same town. Corporate ladder climbing began to pull families apart as early as the 1950's; IBM, for example, was satirized as standing for "I've Been Moved." Then urban planners, working in concert with departments of transportation, exacerbated the problem even for those who stayed in one place. Thanks to their vision of the future, in almost every city, and even in many medium-sized towns, the cohesion of neighborhoods has been decimated by crosstown expressways, on ramps and off ramps. The coup de grace was furnished by the developers of mega-shopping malls and clustered box stores that ripped the guts out of neighborhood businesses, and therefore the ease of pedestrian shopping and social interaction.
As disrupted as we are now -- geographically and in terms of the great divide in urban/suburban planning -- it would be unrealistic to think that we can miraculously go back to simpler, more pedestrian friendly town plans, whether overnight or at all. But we can go forward, because I think most of us yearn for a new version of the community connection some of us vaguely remember, and others intuitively desire.
The challenge -- because our entrepreneurial as well as our personal resources are so limited -- will be to utilize, for now, what we have in place, however imperfect it may be. For example:
i. for now, can the sow's ear that is represented by the suburban McMansion be converted to a silk purse? Can these behemoth blights on the landscape (that are now often empty) be converted, at relatively low cost, to provide modest, but far more intrinsically civilized housing for extended families and/or groups of friends? The 3-6000 square footage alone says yes, as does the wasteful variation on a theme of room usage -- living room, great room, home office and FROG? (in the south at least, that's a Family Room Over Garage. Although it sounds a bit Doctor Zhivago-ish, such a house could be retrofitted fairly easily into separate suites consisting of private sitting rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms, while allowing the ubiquitous and enormous kitchen/"great room" to be allocated for common use. This not only avoids the expense of unnecessarily duplicating kitchens, but also fosters togetherness.
ii: regrettably, few of us have the resources in land or money for family compounds, on which the original house and dispersed separate cottages evolved as a civilized way for different generations to be together, but also maintain individual privacy. That's a sadness, as it is a model that is, in many ways, ideal. So, with our current housing stock, how can we offer everyone an Everyman's version of that graceful arrangement?
At the top of the list, we could convert many of the private boarding schools that are foundering and doomed to go out of business (for example, the one where I teach), not into miniscule sub parcels for the development of more McMansions, but rather, into viable shared communities, villages really, for 100-300 people. The physical plan works well for sharing, as the buildings are already divided between those that are intended for shared use (the old estate house that, on the first floor, offers a vast kitchen, dining room, drawing room and gallery, with attached flanking wings that house an infirmary and a chapel/meeting room); those that are intended for common industry (classrooms that could be converted to offices and studios for entrepeneurial ventures); and those that provide housing of one sort or another (low-rise dormitories and faculty housing that could be converted into more civilized living spaces). These schools come equipped with vans for shared transportation (to the train station, for example), all forms of maintenance equipment (and also the barns in which to store them). They provide ready-made shared playing fields, walking paths through the woods, and lovely open space on which communal gardens could be planted, among other things.
Too complicated? What about reconsidering and redefining the cluster housing model and its target demographic, rejecting the age designation (and subsequent age segregation) of these communities that has effectively resulted in lifeless warehousing of aging retirees. The cluster model works well for people of all ages who are trying to cut down on both space and expenses, and would work even better if a central cluster were devoted to a community kitchen/dining room/library, etc.
Similarly, even nursing homes have something to teach us. One doesn't have to be near death to live alone; nor does one have to be single to believe in taking up less space. Therefore, a more generously designed model, that provided spacious studio, one or two-bedroom units with private kitchenettes and baths, but the availability of shared meals and camaraderie, is something for singles and small families of all ages to think about.
(I'd recommend retrofitting existing nursing homes that are going out of business, except that, in America, they are invariably built on cheap plots of land next to a highway, and the depression factor of that is huge. But there are possibilities to improve the view and therefore the experience: urban chic friends of mine in Miami who didn't mind not having private gardens discussed joining forces to buy a small Deco hotel on the beach (with a beautiful pool) when it went up for sale, and their plan to combine rooms into apartments, while converting the restaurant into a shared private dining room really worked.
At the other end of the architectural spectrum, but of equal attraction as a model of nursing home conversion was one I saw in Nova Scotia, in which units were constructed as staggered, and reasonably attractive one-story cottages, each one having access to a broad sun deck that overlooked a common garden in which residents were encouraged to plant flowers and vegetables for personal and shared use....

Well, I seem to be running on here, and I haven't even gotten to shared community transportation and food co-ops.
Sorry, Aunt Sam, I seem to have suffered an irrational burst of enthusiasm. But thank you for the stirring the little gray cells.

Ineed. He's a good egg, umm, chicken!

I personally hold republicans and democrats in equal contempt. I understand democrats better, the ones who control the party apparatus are Marxists. I certainly don't want to see them prevail.

I like a lot of what some republican leaders say. But I'm sure they talk out of both sides of their mouths.

Unlike the democrats, I honestly don't understand the ultimate goals of the republicans party bigwigs. I've got a feeling that if I did, it would probably scare the hell out of me.

Get real.

How many people drawing welfare would you estimate vote republican? Even one?

That's the core democrat base and it kinda diversifies from there. It's a 1930s Roosevelt creation.