All About US – Promote (the) General Welfare (13th of a series) >From my unpublished book. This chapter added in 1988.
This series is archived at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rich Martin "We are in dire need of housing. Everyone should take a long, hard look at what's going on in America with the homeless." Joyce Brown a.k.a. Billie Boggs New York citizen arrested Oct, 28, 1987, in a campaign to get homeless people off the streets. Promote (the) General Welfare While the city of Dallas was defending its decision to tear down a public housing project in court, and a nearby town went to court to get permission to demolish some uncompleted apartments left be a bankrupt contractor, local TV stations and The Fort Worth Star Telegram were giving front page coverage news coverage to some ramshackle shelters being torn down by city employees. These last dwellings were built under the overpasses of our multi-billion dollar superhighways which the U.S. Congress just decided to up-grade with $88 billion of tax payers hard earned money. One sharp contributor to the Letters-to-the-Editor column made a near-perfect analogy between how Fort Worth was treating the poorest citizens with the same ruthless modus operandi employed by the government of South Africa which made worldwide news bull dosing shanty towns in that country. The sight of city crews tearing down the meager dwellings of Fort Worth's least fortunate human beings was more than the city fathers could bear, although not newsworthy enough to make the national network news hours. Fort Worth had an edge over the above Texas municipalities---they didn't have to through the motions of a "fair" court hearing. All they had was an irritating local public relations problem. And it didn't take them long to arrive at a solution. They ordered the city department destroying the makeshift hovels to stop an desist forthwith---and then they contracted a private sector company with the confiscation and destruction of the humble possessions of the city's most impoverished citizens. In other words, they hired a private gun to do the evil deed. And amazingly, even the local media lost interest. The project and the apartments were eradicated. The Spartan structures along the highways have been trashed like the shanty towns of Africa . Each of the town fathers had their way at the expense of the defenseless people. But perhaps the most revealing thing was that Fort Worth Mayor Bob Bolen ran for re-election several months later, unopposed! You'd think that the sympathetic citizens of that fair city would be seeking a more compassionate leader who was smart enough to develop more humane solution to solve the community's housing problem. Alas, they are no better than the uncivilized African Chieftans. We can expect to read more dispassionate news articles like the one appearing May 31st about an unidentified 48-year-old woman in Dallas . She was squashed by the rear wheels of a truck on which she made her bed. Promote General Welfare, is that what it says in the Preamble? Who's army is he in and why should he be promoted?
