Today in Wisconsin it is unreasonably, no insanely, fucking cold. We are talking 10 below air temp. and 30 below wind chill. Yes it is stupid cold here. As a result of the cold weather the city shut down the schools. Therefore I had many children today in the grocery store with their parents.
In case you don't know, I live in a pretty yuppie neighborhood. It is very European, whereas it is a walking community, it has a large Jewish and Russian population and is overall pretty upper middle class. From where I stand politically, I believe that it is the middle class that truly is responsible for the state of our country. These are the people who go to the polls, they write letters, they are in the P.T.A, and they basically decide the fate of our country. I may be wrong but I would I love for someone to tell me why. Either way the middle class is in control whether they know it or not. So my encounter with a upper middle class soccer mom was very informative and a little saddening.
I look up from my work and there is a white lady standing at the counter. IN the shopping cart there is a boy, maybe twelve, the new thing today is to have you children sit in the large part of the shopping cart along with you grocerys. I approach the customers and make some small talk.
Justin: So no school today, eh?
UpperMiddleClassWhiteLady(UMCWL): Ya, I was surprised.
Justin: Well it is just too cold out and the sad thing is that some kids get sent to school without gloves, and you just can't have that. SO the city did what it had to and shut down the schools.
UMCWL: Ya, I was watching the news today and they were at the Salvation Army. They didn't have enough beds so they were handing out gloves and hats. Imagine, these people don't even have gloves.
Justin: Ya I just watched a special on PBS, last week, about the homeless in Milwaukee. Did you know that there are 12,000 homeless people in Milwaukee.
UMCWL: (Gasp)
Justin: That is like a small city
UMCWL: Some of them sleep along the bike path, sometimes I see their little camps in the woods.
Justin: It is terrible, where do these people go in this weather.
UMCWL: It just makes you wonder, what you can't get a job at McDonalds?
Justin: Most of them are too mentally ill to hold down a job.
UMCWL: You know I never thought about that. Hmmm.
Justin: Well ya, you'd have to be crazy to want to live on the streets.
UMCWL: Ya that makes sense, and the drugs.
Justin: Well the drugs are really just a way for the mentally ill to self medicate themselves.
UMCWL: Or the drugs made them that way
Justin:(Hiding his total disgust and tryinf to find a way to end this conversation and not explode) Ya, I guess there are no simple answers. (A total lie in my mind. I am actually surprised at how simple the answers are)
SO here we have a white upper middle class voting citizen who doesn't realize that homeless people are mentally ill. No wonder absolutely nothing gets done that is good for the poor, ill and old. FOr her it was a question of laziness until she met me.
This whole time I thought this was all Ralph NAder's fault.
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Justin, you may have to help me out on this since you're probably more knowledgable about it than I am, but wasn't there a time when the compassionate US government at the time entrusted much of the permanantly institutionalized population to the invisible guiding hand of the market thus increasing the ranks of the mentally-ill homeless?
peace out.
America maybe be the land of the free, but it certainly isn't the land of the free thinking. This soccer mum is just vomiting back the garbage she is fed through the news media. People should stop watching and believing the propaganda on Fox, ABC, NBC etc and start reading and thinking for themselves. Thanks for being a free thinking American Justin. Andy of (Mark and Andy fame)
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