And nobody notices for days that he's dead, until, likely, a tow truck driver is sent to remove the van, and the smell of dead rotting human causes them to call the police.
This is America. This is what America is like today. Forget all the bullshit about community and charity and compassion and helping hands, if you're poor you have the cooties, the only hand you'll get is the grudging one you get from pestering people until they give you money to go away, if not the back of a hand across your face. And heavens help you if you have too much pride to pester people asking for assistance...
-- Badtux the American Penguin
"He died with a Happy Face..."
ReplyDeleteBack in my better days, I volunteered at a UU church as liaison with the local food pantry (which later became the Houston Food Bank). Occasionally people would come in who needed food right then and there, but were so faded... more likely from hunger than drugs, I'd say... and couldn't even really talk until they got some food in them. In that same time period (middle Reagan era), I bicycled on a path to work, under bridges of major streets; every bridge had two occupants, many with alarm clocks beside their sleeping bags. I.e., they had jobs but not homes.
As a nation, WASF...
My god, how horrible! That's something you might expect to see happen in a third-world country, not here....
ReplyDelete(Unleashing my inner reichwinger here:)
ReplyDelete"Buh-buh-buh he had a VAN! In America, even the poor people are so rich that they can have VANS to starve to death in, instead of dying in a cardboard box or a drainage ditch by the side of the road. Is this a great country, or what?!?"
Back to myself, Steve's story leads me to bring up a vignette passed on by my mom yesterday. Her sister, my aunt, is a hard-core "everybody who does not believe like me" Christopath. She and her whole family live on a farm in southern Maryland. They hates them some gubbermint, even though my aunt has two ne'er-do-well daughters in their 60s who haven't worked in decades, and get by with Social Security disability cheques. They also scrounge from food pantries.
Now, this family has chickens that lay enough eggs that they can sell them to local households. Yet my aunt was cackling last week about the cha-ching score that her unemployed daughter made from a food bank. She got a dozen Eggland's Best eggs that were donated! Woo-hoo, 12 free eggs filched from the mouth of some other poor person, when my aunt's family has a surplus themselves. These hypoChristians make me sick.