Nahgunna play my homeless card here; this commenter of Megan's spouts the party line as well as I can, & he gets apocalyptic!
EconocataclysmJuly 29, 2009 9:42 AMMegan said:
"In practice, what are you going to do with a family that insists on waiting for the perfect Section 8 apartment or assisted housing option to emerge?"
The subtext of this statement is that people who can't get a job are "just lazy". Or, when a speculative bubble has raised the rent on a one-room shack in a crack neighborhood to a little more than you make in a month that something is "wrong" with you.
So, please tell the audience exactly how much time you have spent homeless.
(sound of crickets chirping)
Thought so.
It's real hard to find a job when you have no place to live. Hygiene problems as well as problems storing your stuff, what little you have left, become very serious. And then, of course, since we offshored all of our production and those mythical "information jobs" never appeared to replace them, there might not actually BE a job for you to get even if you could work out all of the logistics of sleeping in a gutter and somehow managing to look presentable enough to GET and KEEP a job. Not to mention GETTING TO A JOB. The public transportation systems in most parts of the country are laughable, assuming even that you CAN afford to use them.
All things you have absolutely NO direct experience of. Therefore you really have nothing to say about the subject that is worth listening to.
No, seriously. You don't.
I know for a fact that people like you think you're pretty darned funny. But you aren't. And the unfunny-ness of this situation is only becoming more apparent by the day. All of those homeless in NYC are about to have LOTS of company. People who have never had the experience of homelessness in their entire lives suddenly losing everything as jobs dry up and the balloon terms in their once so easy looking mortgages start slapping them in the face.
People who will never again buy the line that people who can't get work are "just lazy".
Tens of millions of them. And they vote.
The financial holocaust that was just triggered by the pigs in the financial sector is going to make the 1930's look like a beach party. "Temporary Shelters" will become permanent tent cities. The streets of our cities will be teeming with armies of the newly disenfranchised, all looking for someone to blame.
And as for you... I hope you put all that lovely cash of yours in gold. Because if you didn't, you'll be starving along with the rest of them. Because right-wing pundits who make a living by blaming the poor for being poor are going to go out of fashion faster than the hula hoop.
-Jay Randall
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