Greetings, Kossacks!
Since my last very angry and very depressed diary, I would like to report that I actually got the job! And even though I took an $11,000 a year pay cut, I am happy to have a job. Lucky to have a job. And benefits, paid holidays and all the stuff that temping just didn't have.
I worried that my son and I might find ourselves living in a tent city (since I don't have a car to live in). Okay, my parents would probably help us out, but if they weren't around or didn't have the means? I truly worried about destitution. Sometimes, I would only temp a few days a week, and net less than what I would have netted on unemployment, and times were tough. Three times I supplemented my pantry with a trip to the food bank. (Paying it forward!) But now, I hope, those days are behind me. Sadly, for many people, those days are not behind them, in fact, they are looking at many days like that in the future.
As I read the various diaries about the debt ceiling debate, including cuts to programs that form the bedrock of democratic principles, I keep thinking about the unemployment situation, the destruction of the middle class, the stagnating wages, the off-shoring of jobs to other countries, the implementation of the shock doctrine. I keep thinking of the kind of people I see on my way to work in the morning, the people who are sleeping in doorways, or sifting through garbage bins for food or unwanted treasures, the people who wear their entire wardrobes all at once, and carry plastic garbage bags of whatever possessions they own and have not been able to part with.
Here in Seattle we have always had a substantial homeless population, but it has burgeoned over the last few years. When I was a kid, I thought the only kind of people who lived on the streets were drug addicts, runaways and alcoholics. In the 1980s, due to cuts in government programs for the mentally ill, the streets saw an influx of the mentally ill. (Thank you Ronald Reagan.) Of course nowadays, the people on the streets are the angel ds and the shiznits and TiMTs, the deolivers, MBs and TomPs and even the fishesoutofwater. The homeless people are no longer strangers, they are our families, our cousins, our friends, they are the lafeministas and the trashablancas and the danceyoumonsters. The homeless people aren't just drunks or crazy people, they are the mieps and the liberaldemdaves and the pricemans, the slinkerwinks and the missliberties; the trivs, the agathenas the joanneleons; the mallyroyals and the stevejs. Next time you see someone sleeping in a doorway, it might be someone just like psychodrew, or David Kroning II, or gchaucer2 or Lady Libertine. The homeless aren't the THEM, they are the US, they could be Kossacks, at least back when they had access to computers and broadband.
In 2008, a tent city sprung up in town named after our Mayor, called Nickelsville, which even has it's own Facebook page which since it's existence, is always under threat of being shut down. Here is an article from last September from change.org.
But this beautiful picture diary isn't just about the homeless in Seattle; it's about the homeless in Portland, Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, Missoula, Sacramento, Pittsburgh – it's about the homeless in America.
This diary is not going to analyze any of the debt ceiling arguments currently taking place on dkos, there's plenty of diaries that do that already. Nope, this is going to be a beautiful picture diary of some of our fellow-citizens living on the streets near our homes (for those of us who still have homes). I have included the URLs from which I found these photos, none were taken by me, I just went around the internet choosing a few here and there which tugged at my heartstrings and also made me very grateful that I am not among them.
They Could be Kossacks
From the laist:
A random wordpress blog on the internet:
Don't we all need love!
Nickelsville, Seattle (from the U District Daily).
Nickelsville in it's 2009 location (from Street Roots).
From the Pragmatic Progressive Forum:
I Am Atlanta.
From the Deflation Times, Homeless in America: Tom Stone Photography:
A tent city in Sacramento.
From Care2 Make a Difference:
From an article, "The Rotting Corpse of American Capitalism" found at Dogmatic Slumbers.
A report prepared by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office reveals that America is both a first and third world country where class polarization is more pronounced than in any other “advanced” country.
* The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans.
* The wealthiest Americans in the top 1% of the society increased their income by $524.8 billion, 37 % greater than the poorest fifth of the society, which had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005.
* The total income of the top 1.1 million households was $1.8 trillion, or 18.1 percent of the total income of all Americans, up from 14.3 percent of all income in 2003.
* The total 2005 income of the three million individual Americans at the top was roughly equal to that of the bottom 166 million Americans, analysis of the report showed.
Another First for America: Highest Unemployment among Industrialized Nations
So while our government is entertaining us with debt ceiling hystrionics, that have us rapt and bickering at each other, some of us can almost forget that our unemployment rate is shockingly high and growing higher, and unemployment checks are running out, and food stamps are getting cut, and more people are losing their homes. And some of those people are us.
As mentioned above, back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan emptied out the federally funded institutions for the indigent mentally ill and they swelled the population of the streets in cities all across the nation. Ronald Reagan, a man our current President openly admires. It's hard to even imagine that a Democratic President would put federally funded and tax-payer funded social programs for the neediest of us on the chopping block in order to make a bi-partisan "big deal" with craven crooks and robber barons, but I guess we don't have to imagine it anymore. Folks, that was no rope-a-dope, that was a concession. The only thing that saved the day was that it didn't give enough to the crooks. You know what I say to that big deal?
BFD
5:27 PM PT: Rec listed, w00t! Thanks, Kossacks.
11:24 PM PT: Update X2: More than twice as many recs as comments. That, to me, is an awesome diary metric, and I thank you once again Dear Kossacks.