Last night I had a dream that startled me upright and awake. No doubt it was connected to an observation the night before.
The night before I was on Long Island, in the highly safe and quiet town of Floral Park where not a house can be found for less than a half million. I was outside on the stoop in the wee hours to smoke a cigarette when I noticed a homeless guy walking down the street, surveying the area, I supposed looking for anything of salvage value. I didn't think too much of it at the time, although it was unusual as I had lived there before and don't recall seeing anything like that. It must have hit a nerve inside though, because the dream that startled me awake last night was related. The dream was: I was coming out of a shopping store with a cart of groceries in the dark. Just outside the store, a homeless guy approached me and, hand poised to reach into the cart, started talking about something ridiculous, obviously a feign in front of his plan to grab something from the cart and run. At that instant I awoke, startled. That was the dream. Why did it startle me so? Because at that instant, as I sat upright, I realized something: that the price we're paying for what we've done in the ME and to achieve 'security' is headed to become so steep that we're going to see a consequence we're not thinking about: poor and homeless people, many, many of them. Today we carry - and mostly hide - the divide between the have's and the have-not's. There are lots of very poor people, but we're too pre-occupied with other matters to notice, and since these people are getting enough food to eat, one way or the other, they accept their lot and nobody's talking up for them anyway. Characteristic of the poor are drug use and theft, for reasons not unrelated. We deal with these problems today by packing them into jails and letting them languish in some urban areas, like parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. As you may be aware our jails are bursting at the seams, with more people in jail per capita then any other country on Earth. That's today. Factor this out, extrapolate it, follow the direction - with more and more deficit spending on 'security', more war costs, greater divide between the have's in their gated communities and the poor on the streets - and what do you see? More poverty at the low end, more drug use, more in jail, and more homeless people. In this dream, I glimpsed over this horizon and that's what I saw. Bill _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
