Poverty

I had today off, so I decided to take care of several odds n' ends that need tending to... making lesson plans for the next few weeks, getting a smog check, running by the House of Blues to purchase Decemberists tickets, getting a haircut, etc. In the course of the day I had to run downtown to the Dept. of Wildlife offices to pick up a trunk of animal pelts for my Science Clubs this week, and on my way home I decided to take surface streets in order to avoid the cluster-fuck that is the I-15. Anyway, as I was going home, I drove east on Vegas Drive, towards H street. As I progressed east, the homes and businesses began to look more and more forlorn, boarded or barred windows, trash in the parking lots and along the chainlink fences... nothing I hadn't seen on a regular basis in our own neighborhood. Nothing unusual yet... In fact, we live just inside the redevelopment district, in a statistically impoverished area. I occasionally joke about us living in poverty, and my having come through college impoverished (statistically speaking) but I hadn't realized until today how far from true poverty I've gotten in the last several years, and that by comparison, even when I was eathing nothing but oatmeal and day-old discount bread, I was never truly impoverished. Within the gap between having little enough money to be identified as in being poverty and the state of existence of those I saw next is as wide as the gap between The president's Elite and where I am today.
My realization came, I think, as the culmination of three things:
1. I've been reading the comic series Transmetropolitan, and in the recent few I've read the story has boiled down to the fact that politicians either exploit the poor or basically piss on them, while the voters, who are drifting farther towards the impoverished side of the cultural gap, are topo stupefied by the pop consumer media culture to even notice, or to give a shit. It's a cool series, but provokes serious thinking, at least sometimes.
2. I read an article on Yahoo news about hate crimes against the homeless, and how they have increased by like 60% in the last few years, and how most are perpetrated by teens. It went on to discuss how the children who commit these crimes have these latent prejudices against the poor and the weak. Scary stuff.
3. As I continued my drive home, I came upon the worst example of homelessness and destitution that I have personally ever laid eyes on. Worse than downtown LA, worse than downtown Denver... simply worse. As I approached Main Street and Owens, for several blocks the scene began to resemble the footage we sometimes see on TV of Third World nations. Images of Darfur, of El Salvador from the 80's, Kosovo, etc. I am not being overly dramatic here either. There were suddenly people on the streets, more and more as I continued on. They were all dirty, dressed in rags, sitting, standing, some with bags and some with stolen shopping carts... no signs of commerce anywhere, just closed buildings, trash everywhere, chainlink fences surrounding boarded up, run-down buildings... As I went along, more and more people began to appear, by dozens and dozens; sleeping, sitting, hiding from the sun under warped pieces of cardboard if the were lucky, in the slivers of shadow from fenceposts if they weren't. I probably saw no less than 100 people, milling about, walking across the streets, sitting or laying on the sidewalks, some even literally in the gutter, trash everywhere... most of them old, many of them black, fewer white...
I turned right, towards the freeway, a little more shaken than I realized until I had left that scene behind me. I'm not sure exactly how I feel, just a little fucked up that I know in a few hours or days at most, I'll conveniently forget that scene though it will continue to fester, a very real sickness in our social body, and one which will make the whole of our society ill in the end unless tended to.
Too gloomy. I have to go get my hair cut.