The City is a Desert

Spun of ANON http://www.writerscafe.org/writers/Nadia/ People want to save the worse cases, but so many want to create them as well. (Picture is Pauline Hanson... Ummm you most likely have to be Australian to know her and her evil ways.)

The city is a desert, land mines come in the form of creatures carrying knives and guns and irrefutable advancements into personal space. I am among the 11,752 homeless people living in the Washington area, one of the one in four children among that lot, there are only 2.938 of us, we don’t stand out all that much. Our brethren have been abandoned in places like Somalia and India, social ties they have not, they have no crutch to hold them to their feet as they starve, the places are a desert provision, void of scavenging grounds. As the flies await their meager flesh the snow waits aloft to char my toes and rob the sanity still hoarded within my warm mind, I may wander fall and never wake.

The great depression threatens to revisit these shores with a velocity our pampered hides could never have imagined and this city is a desert, still laden with lead coughed through tail pipes of bygone days now and forever running through these veins. My mother was once a student she never realized her dreams, caught up in love and lost in promise she became clouded with drugs after losing two weeks rent for days spent in bed paying for 14 hour days against a mill stone. Her body failed to keep the pace, and her thoughts couldn’t escape foul stale tastes of liquor, dense film of nicotine and the air of desperate grapples upon her skin, all to fend for me. She’s fallen from the angels she’s lost from even gypsy ways, the people cried NO MORE HAND OUT’s she was broken well before she died.

I’ve been from post to pillar from roof to roof i’ve roamed, beaten, bribed and shamed, touched and felt, emotionally maimed. Couldn’t trust my shadow, can not trust a soul, this city is a desert, but its back ways shelter me and my doll. We are willing now for spring time another night we cannot face, of all the empty people I still search for my mothers trace. This city is a desert the cold streets are my home. I often wonder what would have happened, if there was still a welfare state, perhaps this bitter winters night I might still have my mother and perhaps a right full plate.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/little-change-found-in-washington-area/n20080515050509990048

There are many many reasons people are on welfare, some people its true do milk the system for all its worth which was never its intent and there are many forms of welfare. There are many more who without it would indeed starve and freeze to death and some still do even in western countries. One of the only things that prevents the sort of poverty experienced in third world countries from happening in the places like the US, Australia, across Europe, England, Canada and the list goes on, is the provision of welfare, social policy that cares for the most underprivileged. Just think for a moment what the poor side of town might look like without current social systems. Just for a moment think about what separates the impoverished and destitute from other impoverished sections of society in other nations. We can’t stand to see the images thrust upon us of starving children and adults alike in third world nations, ravaged by drought and a lack of social support networks, non existing infrastructure, unemployment, unavailable education and very few safety net provisions provided by their governments via the general populace, the redistribution of wealth, its just not seen at all. What would happen in western nations if we ever decided to operate in the same manner? No welfare, no public education, no social infrastructure at all. I hear so many people whine about their taxes paying for these social provisions, yet I have to wonder how comfortable they would be in a country that potentially could house socioeconomic divides just as vast as any third world nation. If you’re not feeding, educating and housing the people, just who is?

Unemployment rate jumps to 5.5 percent in May
Friday June 6, 11:38 am ET

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080606/economy.html?.v=14

© 2008 Touché Armada

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Mark D. Chevalier

What's even scarrier is the fact that before the "New Deal" it took a world war to pull us out of the last depression. I think you're right though. If there were no social programs after already having them in place I think the structure of the nation would begin to disintegrate rapidly. A very thought provoking piece you have here Armada. Nicely done!
M