This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

I guess the teams are all decided for the big football game. The city has been cleaning up the route between the airport and the stadium. We wouldn’t want any of those affluent people flying in from around the world or across the country, renting limos and spending thousands of dollars. To see the true state of homelessness in America and spoil their “Superbowl” experience. If we can just get all the homeless people to hide for that one day, it will somehow be alright.

Why oh why, can’t we solve the scourge of homelessness? My guess is that the people who want to don’t have the money or the power. And the people with the money and power, really don’t care. A mayor or concerned city officials couldn’t do it alone, it’s too big and the forces are beyond their control. One lone man with a bucket trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.

If rents go up continually and the cost of living goes up and wages do not. People end up living in their cars, trying to hang on to the only support system they know. Hoping against hope, that they will get a lucky break and land a job or a better job. Like Dante’s playground, that kind of thinking is on the highest level. I’ll get out of this somehow and return to my normal middle-class life and awake from this nightmare.

Everyone knows the rote, in the 60s you could support a family with a single full-time paycheck. In the 70s and 80s, both partners worked full-time jobs, while their kids didn’t do their homework and invented Grunge music instead.  Then people began to double up; the kids didn’t move away after high school. They didn’t move away after college either. They just couldn’t afford to move away! Homes became family freeholds. And the ones that did move away, some became a big success. Some became only a moderately successful but were working towards better things, when life or reality tripped them up.

The transmission fell out of the car, or someone got sick. Someone got laid off and there isn’t enough money to pay the bills. So, you begin selling things trying to stay afloat. It’s a great little neighborhood barometer. When one neighbor is selling their motorcycle, maybe they don’t want to do it anymore. But when all your neighbors are trying to sell Jet skis, motorcycles, bass boats or riding lawnmowers, someone is feeling the pinch.

You are caught between two worlds and have been sucked down the rabbit hole into Alice’s nightmare. Where nothing works, especially you. Have a seat chum; you’re on the menu. You want to believe that this situation is only temporary. But you fear that you are only lying to yourself for self-protection against the realization, that you are only lying to yourself. You are not a visitor here; you are a resident. It’s not a place; it’s a subculture. Charleton Heston’s Soylent Green, come to life!

“Send in the People Movers Lieutenant, scrape em off the pavement and dump em somewheres!”

Sleeping in a car or living with rip stop nylon for walls in an alley or hidden away in some unwanted clump of trees. Hanging on like lichens to the rocks. It’s a difficult neighborhood to navigate where self-respect and self-esteem are lacking, and held at a premium. The wise animals stay in the trees and off the jungle floor at night, for safety. The only protection from the predators is avoiding harm’s way. What else could you do? Call the police? You are new around here, aren’t you?

So, there you are eking out a meager existence as the urban untermunchin. Living in a combat zone of cops, street gangs and mental health concerns. Both yours and others, it was Saint Ronny of Reagan, who told the courts that involuntary commitment was all wrong. It meant that the rights of mentally ill to go untreated were being violated, and the government was being forced to send a check to the hospital every month. Give the mentally ill their freedom! And the right to live in the street by your house, and go untreated, and we’ll keep the check! By God, that’s getting big government off your back at its finest!

But now for the city to come in and post signs on phone poles because they don’t like to talk to the untermunchin. By Order of the City of Los Angeles… GIT! 72 hours Paco, then we come in here with heavy equipment and put your life in the dumpster! We don’t care where you go, as long as it’s out of sight. But you can’t stay here. Look, we’ve painted new signs and murals along this roadway at great expense, “Welcome to our happy and successful community!” We don’t want you hanging around ruining the ambiance. Now scram untermunchin!

If only it were a Hollywood movie, and I was the star of this Hollywood movie. But it’s real! What do they expect? The homeless to just pick up walk off into the Pacific Ocean, like Frederick March in the original, A Star is Born? Offering hotels coupons to please go away, Mrs. Drysdale is having her Bridge Club meeting this afternoon and doesn’t want her guests to see those disgraceful hillbillies!

Hotel coupons to the homeless, are like a combat solider on leave. All you can think about is how soon, before you have to go back out into combat. What’s gonna happen then? Maybe time enough to find a new place to not exist. To live life in the weeds by the highway, or some other crack in the pavement.

To be told by the community to scram, beat it, scat! Go way! You ain’t pretty enough, now, I’m giving you just 72 hours to get lost and hide. We got rich folks coming to town, driving right down this here road and just wouldn’t do, if they ever saw the likes of you!

Soylent Green is made of low wages. It is made of tiered equality, broken families and broken dreams, lightly frosted to taste with diminished concern for human civilization.

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“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt,