We all try to tidy up our home before visitors arrive. We vacuum; we don’t sweep the dirt under the rug. Everyone wants others to think their house is in order. We put our best faces on in public. No matter how much we protest, it’s human nature to want people to think the best of us.
Not all that long ago, if a woman gave birth to a child with Down Syndrome, or some other severe mental or physical disability, it was common to send them away to a home for “their kind.” My sister Janet faced this pressure when my niece Denise was born in 1968. They called her a “Mongoloid,” which was the clinical term at the time for those with Down Syndrome. Fortunately, my sister persevered and had the courage to raise her alongside her five other children. It was more common to vacuum them up, discard them. Keep your house in order. What will the neighbors say?
My work seems to attract people from what I call the invisible part of America. The system doesn’t work well for about eighty percent of us, but for the Invisibles it doesn’t work at all. People who, through no fault of their own, were born into wildly dysfunctional families. Often abusive parents, sibling estrangement, and receiving no emotional or financial support. Yes, some can rise above that, but most can’t. I hear from people regularly, who are floundering. Their sad stories reinforce my dark views on the present state of this country.
When human beings are struggling, they basically have two options. They can turn to family, who more often than not aren’t there in any meaningful sense. Or they can seek help from the social safety net we pay for, but is so complex and impenetrable that it might as well not be there either. My long experience with my brother, and to a lesser extent my niece, taught me just how difficult it is to get any of that assistance that might be there, but is dangled teasingly just out of reach. Matthew Lesko, the question mark guy, made a very nice living out of selling books that supposedly revealed all the government benefits that are otherwise inexplicably unknowable.
I know people who are homeless. Living in their car or a tent in the woods. I know too many who don’t even have a car. Try not having personal transportation in this Banana Republic. We offer very spotty bus service, and no real mass transit system. People I know who are making $15 an hour or less, and thus will never be able to buy any car that runs, have to Uber to work. Which eats up a large chunk of their daily pay. What is the solution for those people? Like well over 70 percent of Americans, they don’t even have $1000 in savings. Even before used cars skyrocketed in price under the Biden Reign of Terror, they couldn’t have afforded even a nonworking vehicle.
I know people who can’t buy insulin for their diabetes, because they don’t have any health insurance. And no, that isn’t because of Obamacare. I know others who might have a serious illness, but their woefully inadequate insurance doesn’t cover testing and possible treatment. No one should be financially ruined by the costs of our horrific Medical Industrial Complex, but many have been. In these cases, that stage isn’t even reached, because they literally can’t access healthcare services.
No one should be homeless in the wealthiest country in the world. The crisis of people living on the streets was front page news in the 1980s. Some Democratic Party politicians notably slept on heating grates to try and publicize the issue. In the ensuing forty years or so, absolutely no progress has been made in this area. In fact, we now have huge tent cities in California, and human beings defecating on the streets. And the government doesn’t even clean it up. There are many reasons for this explosion in homelessness, but regardless no one is doing anything about it.
I know a much younger guy who tried to kill himself about ten years ago. His parents and siblings never even came to see him when the hospital called them. So his entire family support system is there, but not functioning for him. And the social safety net is supposedly there, but almost impossible to navigate. Especially when one has to work at a low paying job to barely survive, which leaves no time to contact any part of this social safety net. If you work day shift, then those places are closed when you get off. Try making “personal calls” at one of these horrific dead-end jobs.
I know a woman in her sixties who works at Panera Bread. Despite having physical issues, she has to walk back and forth to work each day, crossing a busy highway in the process. For that kind of “new normal” job; low pay, few if any raises, few if any benefits, and little chance at promotion. It’s shameful that anyone working a job can’t accumulate enough money to buy even an old used car. I know lots of young, and even older people, working the same kind of blue-collar jobs I did in my twenties, who can only dream of having their own transportation. That wasn’t the case in my youth.
Jack London wrote The People of the Abyss over a century ago. The fact that it’s still relevant reading tells you all you need to know. The War on Poverty was obviously as big a failure as the War on Drugs. People call me a socialist when I harp on the unfair distribution of wealth, which has actually grown even worse since London’s day, and now impacts far more people. The great American middle class, built during the post-World War II era, has been decimated by massive immigration, globalist trade policies, corporate greed, and outsourcing.
I wrote a book touching on all this a few years back. Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All exposes this rigged economic system. It shows how, as happens in casinos, 80 percent of the people must “lose” to varying degrees, in order for 20 percent to be “winners.” Obviously, the biggest winners of all are the top tier of the One Percent. They are utterly above our laughable legal system and are more entitled than any real or mythical welfare queen ever dreamed of being.
The same mainstream media that serves as mouthpieces for the corrupt state, portrays the America they enjoy, as entitled “winners” of crony capitalism. They may occasionally have a story about a Black family who’s struggling, but it’s placed in the meaningless context of “racism,” and attributed to “White Privilege,” not economic unfairness. You can be confident that no one on television, or in films, was ever one of the Invisibles. Sure, they may claim a Jim Carrey or somebody was homeless for a while as a youth, but as I documented in a chapter of the book that wasn’t included in the published version, but was published on my blog, virtually everyone who is famous for anything came from wealth, or at least solid upper middle-class backgrounds. You can read all three deleted chapters here: Survival of the Richest Bonus Chapters
No local “journalist,” let alone multi-million dollar talking head, ever lived in their car, or worse couldn’t afford a car to sleep in. The only good thing about Walmart is the fact they apparently let people sleep in their cars in their parking lots. No celebrity, or future CEO, wondered where their next meal was coming from as a kid. Or stayed sick because they had no health insurance. Celebrities, like our political “representatives,” cannot relate to any of the problems millions of Americans have to contend with daily, because they have never had to face them.
