Level by Level

What is a society? What are we doing? Everyone's mad all the time, pumped up on retail crime propaganda, and one required component of that anger is not being in the crosshairs, but redefining victimhood as having to see people in the crosshairs, poor people with no place to live but tents, thanks to quite deliberate wealth hoarding, public fund misallocation, and lying, brought to us again and again by politicians and the monied class that is now characterized by having no class at all, as well as a vanishing amount of empathy, ethics or joy. Knowing that, I also know not to put much of any stock in what these bullhorn hogs are screaming about day in, day out, though the narrative they advance as truth really falls apart when you witness who and what their screaming seeks to drown out.

Yesterday, I passed the encampment under the overpass nearest my home, neither of which is in a bad area, unless you consider a bad area to be anyplace in a metropolis you can see visible poverty or, in the fashion of our current times, even just things you don't care for, a category spanning an enormous range of experiences that are now being weirdly equated, especially by westsiders, as if driving by someone without a home is as traumatic as not having a home.

Yesterday, I didn't avert my eyes as I tend to do, and caught myself starting to do, because the public shaming of people living in tents has taken gaping to a breathless level and I felt like a prying eye even looking at this point. But when I did look, I saw a woman in her 60s in a wheelchair, back to the street, facing a tent, talking to a tall man in his 40s she seemed to know about something she was upset about, hand gesturing, and I saw a man in his 20s sweeping the area in front of his tent on the sidewalk across the street. They read to me as people dwelling in the raw and ongoing aftermath of terrible financial situations, people who ran out of rent money, whose car got dispossessed, people with no place to go, as stats on actual housing placements will show. Eviction, job loss, trouble functioning as a veteran, trouble functioning period explain, more often than not, how people have come to cluster together in these encampments, despite all the attention attracted by, then diverted to, the criminal element that exists there as in any other community, only with far less power than the criminals governing the way this economy is structured, this structure now falling down, level by level.