The Culture of “Desperate Enough"

[blondeatlast]

It’s a daily discomfort. My commute takes me right past the VA hospital on the east side in the morning, so in the winter, I see them huddled around the bus stop. Not waiting for the bus, mind, but there’s warmth and a friend there. The grass is damp, so they linger there. The lucky one gets the bench. Always, they yield to the bus-waiters, especially the moms with strollers, the older than they, the handicapped.

They arrive there when they are healthy enough to get there and they have the funds. Then, the wait begins. Is this the day they are desperate enough to be admitted? Admitted means a shower, coffee, food, relief from the pain of their often-distorted reality. I imagine how desperate one must be to think that a stint in the Veteran’s Hospital is a life improvement.

The culture of the working class promises to become the “desperate enough” culture if the Bush administration has its way. Hungry? Your food stamps have been cut off, so are you desperate enough to pack up the kids to the St. Vincent De Paul? Have you even got the bus fare?

Sick? No AHCCS (Arizona’s equivalent to Medicaid)? Busk up that bus fare somehow, and hopefully you can make it to County Hospital.

Sound like life on the streets? It is, but there will be a VISIBLE increase in it if George Bush has his way.

I think of the alarming numbers of children in my son’s school who get a reasonably nutritious meal once or twice a day through the school lunch program. Some of these children will, God have mercy; starve, right in my son’s classroom. My son doesn’t know who benefits from this, but he and his classmates will know far too soon who’s been cut off.

I’m 45, and I can honestly say I’ve never known anyone who was in desperate poverty. But I know people who are a paycheck away from it. Once their safety nets are cut off, and they will be the first to be cut, they will be. And my son will know who they are, and one will be one of his very best friends.

In George Bush’s America, in a very few years, we will see just what is “desperate enough.” The sick, the hungry, and the poverty-stricken will be everywhere. There will no longer be enough alleys and thresholds to shelter them.

You and I will see them and wonder how things got this bad.

George Bush will never see them. In his “palace,” avoiding the unpleasantries of papers and American citizens, they will camp out in front of the White House, where they will be invisible to the occupants, but chillingly ubiquitous to the rest of us., including those who voted for George Bush.