Will Code For Food
This time I have assumed that every one of you most likely has seen this or something similar during your internet travels. So in posting this picture I wanted to talk about the picture itself. About what I see or feel about what I see.
Humor. Haha. The bum will code for food. Html coders went out of business and now are all bums. So I see the humor in it. But I see more. Look deeper at the picture. Look at the buildings behind the man. Look like poverty to you? Besides the bum, does the area he is standing in look like a run down industrial area to you? Buildings made in the sixties at the earliest.
And the irony of our outsourcing economy a joke within the joke. Our economy shaky at best being held afloat by loans and a war time driven stockmarket. So will more and more Americans end up the same way as this bum? But I've known some bums. They don't have the willpower or patience to wait out being able to save up for a place to live. If they get a job they live in the weeds how long before they can eat or buy crap they want? Alot of apartments have a first, last, and security deposit. Do we expect drunks sleeping on the street to come up with that kind of money? And before you suggest they reform, admit that some people cannot do that. They are drunks who drink or get sick. Dedicated drunks who get the shakes, or go through DT's because they always drink. The hiders of booze. The secret midnight drinker. The drink all day every day at work or anyway. They fall from grace and end up living on the streets and in the bushes and we send them to jail. Jail them and take them to court then fine them for their transgressions. We fine people with no money and no place to live for not having any money or any place to live.
I'm not some soft touch, support your local transient kind of guy though. I heard of CC camps long ago. The government housed you and took you places where large amounts of manpower were needed. They fed you and provided clothes along with medical care. They helped you save money by banking your cash for you. You could buy things off the canteens that followed the work. But you were paid dirt. Better than the average dirt but still not very well. But it was during a depressed period of our country's history. Our government went to work putting our citizens to work doing things our country needed done. And I'd suggest creating local programs similar to that. For the transients and the drunks.
Or possibly open air parks with bathing facilities and a continual police presence. This keeps more of what many see as a problem element of today's society in a small local area that is enforced for everyone's safety. Because there are any number of reports about the homeless every day in most cities. Taken officers off of jobs they would probably rather be doing that are probably more important to the public's well being as well. I think I'd rather have our cops checking out the rapes and shootings alot more than I'd want them rousting some bum for sleeping in the wrong place. By creating a place where their actions are tolerated to a degree you tidy up a mess of problems all at once.
And there is the matter of the homeless taking it to court. If they are going to be fined for it, and taken to jail, the cities really have a duty to provide them some place where they won't be breaking the law. The local shelters are often filled to capacity and many of the homeless are unable to follow the simple criteria of admission to be sober at entry. It is why many are homeless after all isn't it? When cities jail the homeless for being human with no place of their own they punish poverty. They are punishing someone for failure. A failure to have money, hold a job, stop doing whatever. And that really seems a terrible thing to do. Very unChristian some would say.
And the silly picture went and done set me off. I stared at a picture and let my mind wonder. Here we are now. Somewhere later in the journey. And not really anything to do with the picture other than the last part of my babble about UnChristain behavior, please allow me to elucidate a bit more. Let me explain I use the Christian as the Samaritan example. A religious or moral feeling of doing unto the world and our neighbors decently. It's not just Chritians who have high ideals and morals of helping our fellow humanity to not starve or suffer. It's an idea shared by many peoples and religions. You try and help those less fortunate. You don't kick the little people while they are down.
But if that is the case, and people are reelecting people who pass laws that kick the little guy, well......... What does that tell you about our government? Our elected leaders? The people electing them? Has our country become the big bully? Are we the guys stealing everyone's lunchmoney? If you looked at world affairs you could find those instances where we looked to have done things for humanitarian reasons. And I applaud those moments. Even the staged ones that are really just for publicity. At least some good comes out of it for a change. But are we more than just the ignorer of the worlds woes? I mean we do "ignore" our own country's poor and imprisoned. We do seem to treat our own like shit. Why should I expect our leaders are doing any better for the rest of the world?
Now I apologize. Really I do. I kind of went over the top when I suggested our government treats our own people like shit. I was probably speaking out of my ass when I was considering health reform, child care and education, military cuts, medicare cuts, medicade cuts, Social Security cuts, VA cuts, and cuts to about every law that has been around to protect us, the little people, from people like, well, them.
So you see a drunk. I see a whole shitload of issues. All wrapped up in a nice little package by a drunk and his little cardboard sign. I know I may be a little over the top but it gets my point across. Illustrates in another of the million little twinkling lights, what slimy crooks our politicians are. What liars and thieves they are. What sexual deviants and morally corrupt persons they be. And that folks is the best government money can buy.
