People to Politicians: Address The Needy
As a child I wondered of my elders ‘where were you’ during WWII? Why had you not “done something”? And found always the vague responses unsatisfying, referencing uncertainty as to what (often as a child) could have been done and even uncertainty (unconvincingly) regarding what had been happening. The callow youth thinks: unsatisfactory, unconvincing, culpable.
But here we are as members of a drive-around society confronted every day with a small army of homeless, begging from every stop light, evincing unrequited misery and suffering over and over again; colonies below every bridge underpass and encampments inside every highway interchange.
What are we thinking? Where are we?? My children ask me this every day, and not as a past reference. This is the here-and-now. And I have no answer and I do not know what to do and I do not know why our political leaders so fail us all by failing to address economic inequality.
Are we not a “rich society”? A “developed” country? Can we not afford to treat and house such unfortunates? We read of, even speak of “Dickensian Times” with a smugness that belies our own involvement in analogous abominable treatment (never mind creation) of the poor.
We are living through a period of dreadful disregard for a vast underclass society, collateral damage of this war for boundless treasure being waged by the 1% on the rest of us. True, in the quest to hoarde every last one of the nation’s cookies inside fewer than 200 bank accounts, the middle class is