I have a lot of fucking problems with modern society, and I’ve got a keyboard, so I’m going to tell you about some of them. if I tried to attack them all we’d be here for days, so i just did some thinking into the keyboard this morning and this is what came out. I realize I don’t present any solutions, ill think about that part later.
We should be fighting poverty at the causes and conditions and we totally can. Instead, we are fighting the poor. Every time I ended up homeless in suburbia, I got the fuck out of there because I have been charged and fined for panhandling when I was only existing, and my existence was problematic for the suburbanites, who worked so hard to move to where they wouldn’t have to witness poverty. that’s always the reason I ended up here in NYC, if you find yourself without housing, you’re better off in a major metropolitan area. “if you go hungry in new york city, it’s because you’re lazy”-Chessmaster Mike
There is literally a whole form of architecture designed to make the homeless more uncomfortable than they already are. It looks like spikes in places where someone could possibly recline, and tilted benches so that there can be nowhere for a homeless person to sleep.
try this: Go find a public bathroom in New York City, when you can’t then you’ll realize why people piss on the street everywhere… what are you supposed to do?
Poor people spend years incarcerated without conviction because they can’t afford bail as low as $100 (sometimes even lower). They usually plead guilty to a crime they may be innocent of just to get out of jail on time served , and that keeps the justice system moving because if everyone tried to defend themselves at trial, the whole system would collapse under the weight of the workload. These people then have criminal convictions on their record that can prevent them from achieving gainful employment in the future, and therefore remain in poverty. So, the system perpetuates poverty, of course. You also remove parents from the lives of their children for stretches of time, which causes future problems that, you guessed it, will perpetuate poverty for generations. If there is generational wealth, there is certainly also generational poverty.
Seventeen-year-old Bronx native Khalief Browder spent three years incarcerated on Rikers Island, much of it in solitary confinement for being accused (not convicted) of stealing a backpack and not being able to bail out. The post-traumatic stress from the ordeal led to his eventual suicide. The total value of items in his accused theft was under $1,000.
Compare that to the Sackler family, of Purdue Pharma: a very convincing argument could be made that they are responsible for the current opioid crisis when they flooded the market with synthetic opioids in the late ’90s and early 2000s and made billions of dollars. What was the punishment? A $6 billion fine. That sounds like a lot of money, right? I mean, to me, $100 is a lot of money. I read an estimate that the profits of OxyContin were $35 billion, so… nobody is going to be missing meals over the $6 billion settlement, and no one will be spending even one night in jail. They even tried to file for bankruptcy and make stealth offshore money moves to avoid paying the fine for what could reasonably be considered mass murder for profit.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of opioid overdose deaths in the United States between 1999 and 2020 was approximately 841,000. So, if you’re poor and someone thinks you stole their backpack with their iPod in it, you could spend three years in the hole and lose your life to the mental illness that comes from it. If you’re wealthy, you can be at least partially responsible for damn near a million deaths and just pay your way out of it. Got it.
oh yes, i just paid my phone bill! but now i’m worth 17 cents, so, here’s the usual fundraising link: https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
hopefully i wont catch a charge for panhandling.
