If people in our web community could get over the meta-battles for a moment, racism and poverty are being paraded all over the media and in the streets of Atlanta:
More than a thousand people gathered Wednesday outside a metro-Atlanta shopping mall in hopes of being placed on a waiting list for federal housing assistance.
Fights broke out, children were reportedly trampled, and police had to stop the crowd from storming a nightclub being used by the East Point Housing Authority in East Point, Ga, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
UPDATE (11:24 PM Eastern): Officials now estimate that a crowd of 30,000 turned out, three times what they had originally anticipated.
Is government services supposed to be some sort of lottery designed to reduce our humanity? When will this rat race to the bottom end?
Public housing waiting lists easily take a year or never to accept you.
A friend of mine who lived in the UK finds this incident utterly barbaric. And in the search for a justification of what idle bystander to misery and squalor our government's become, explanations fail. This isn't even about the economic depression in this country. It's about unmitigated greed and stubborn cruelty permitted by dogma.
From the Huffington Post:
Television station 11Alive reports that the line for Section 8 housing vouchers formed two days ago and grew into the hundreds Tuesday night. People even slept outside the nightclub...
By Wednesday morning, the crowd had grown so large that East Point police began patrolling the area in riot gear and first responders were tending to people who were overheating in the sun.
...officials, feeling overwhelmed, did not open the doors at 9 a.m. as they had planned, reports CBS Atlanta. Those waiting in line were told by officials to move from one location to another before riot gear-clad police and housing officials handed out applications.
Here's the worst part: these Americans were outside overnight and in the heat, waiting for only 200 units that are already full:
East Point's approximately 200 public housing units are full, according to 11Alive, and more than 400 Section 8 vouchers are already in use. It is unlikely that many of those waiting for the applications would ever receive the housing funds.
Ed Schultz:
"Aren't we better than this?"
Huffpo doesn't seem to mention the elephant in the room, but I will. The overhwelming majority of this crowd is black. Matt Drudge referred to them as a "mob" on his front page. And the structural racism in public housing's shortage today goes back to a more clearly racially-charged time. In the 1960s, many Republicans also supported anti-poverty programs. As soon as the Nixon juggernaught (aided by Reagan and other thugs) smeared anti-poverty and section 8 as black welfare instead of the American tradition of opportunity, the programs fell to the butcher's block. No more Republican support. And we're reaping that today, in spades.
From kossack Floande, below:
It's criminal the way this was handled, keeping those folks waiting in the heat for nothing. And some of the press couldn't wait to emphasize that the crowd was angry and restless. More stories of poor African Americans who might become violent. Just like after Katrina and in Haiti. It's really disgusting.
It reminds me of the brutality in one of Shakespeare's tragedies:
Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive
That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?
Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey
But me and mine; how happy art thou then
From these devourers to be banished! -- Titus Andronicus
The three values of the French Revoution were liberty, fraternity and equality. Democratic values. Since the late 60s and especially the early 80s these seem to be increasingly less embodied by our society, where Pravda-like declarations of our immense "freedoms" abound.
This is about resentment. But not only that, it's also about the fear that justice for all comes at the expense of prosperity for any. The result is an America where the poor and working deny their fellow working class citizens. What those pumped full of fear don't see is the moral and economic pain that results from all from this triage. It's a race to the bottom. The richest country in the world gives incentive for the poor to fight the other poor with essentially no benefit after the effort, and sicks the police on them to boot. Madness.
UPDATE: Thank you. There are still ties that bind us all, including a belief in opportunity and justice for all Americans. We cannot let the right defeat that compact.