Land of Wonder

Sometimes you start to wonder what’s happening in this world.

A school principal in some East Coast city cancelled prom night because the kids had a history of getting hammered on booze and drugs, staging orgies, and spending too much money on parties and limos.

Damn, you think, that’s horrible. But then what do we expect. We wean our kids on glitzy celebrity shows, tales of the rich and famous, the Paris Hilton’s, the supermodels, the actors and athletes who make more in a week than the average working stiff in America makes in two or three years. We show kids the glitz and gilt-edged world that some lucky folks inhabit, dangle it in front of them like diamonds hanging from a perfect earlobe.

In LA’s Skid Row, a permanent underclass lives on the streets in the shadow of ongoing gentrification. Thousands of people – some of them mentally ill or physically handicapped or both – make their way through rat and roach infested streets, past dealers and pimps and whores, boarded-up buildings and rusted cars. Maybe it’s one city, but it’s two completely different worlds.

Same in other cities, of course. The past twenty-five years haven’t been easy for the working class, with wages stagnant and jobs leaving for China faster than you can say, “So long manufacturing base.” Call for decent jobs at decent wages with decent benefits and people think you’re crazy or naive.

Capitalism, man, free enterprise, though when the going gets sticky Capital likes a hand from Government, a tax break, a subsidy, a guarantee; Capital likes to steal from the public and then make the public pay the tab.

So you see multi-million dollar condos going up alongside Skid Row, glitz and luxury above and beyond Third World poverty and hurt. Don’t look out the window and you won’t see it. Nobody’s fault, right, just the way it is, there have always been rich and poor, and hey, maybe them folks on the street deserve their sorry lot.

We fashioned this deal by placing capital over labor, profit above people, private gain above public good. It came like a wave that just kept coming, surging, washing away everything in its path. For the fortunate minority, this big wave ushered in the best of times; the rest were left to pick through the waterlogged rubble.

America.