My city is filled with the unhoused. As you walk the streets, the smell urine and feces greet you. The downtown speaks of a once vibrant past now forgotten; buildings are boarded up- something has gone terribly wrong.
The centers of our communities have been hollowed out. The so-called middle class dwindles. The unhoused, like zombies, wander the streets.
When did whatever it would take to help become too costly, too expensive? When did we come to accept that the mentally ill and drug addicted were destined to die on our streets?
I don’t exactly know but it was probably around the time the “greed is good” crowd took control of our politics. When cutting taxes, the mechanism to ensure social programs are funded, became the path to “freedom.”
According to this concept of “freedom,” which is really just a return to Lochnerism, the person most free is the freelancer, the so-called gig worker. Yet, ironically, it’s hard to imagine persons less free, in our pay-to-play system, than is the precarious gig worker.
In truth, such “freedoms” have made us unfree. And, as wealth has consolidated as it’s risen to the top, more and more people are experiencing the absence of wealth- they own nothing and rent everything, sitting as serfs on the manor of this ever-evolving techno-feudalism.
Private equity now runs the housing market. There’s no mechanism to correct it seemingly, as both major political parties have forsaken the people, preferring marketing instead of community organizing/building to win elections/retain power.
Back on my streets, no eye contact is made. We have been made stranger to each other, to ourselves. The products of our labor are owned by someone else, we follow orders and perform tasks dictated by our employers, we compete with other workers and our peers, and, ultimately, we find ourselves disconnected from our potential, without the prospect of realizing our aspirations.
In this Neo-Gilded Age, we’ve been alienated from what matters.
But there’s a new way to live. It requires courage and self-awareness. It calls for us to reconnect with ourselves and others.
When will we finally awaken and build anew? My city needs to know, as do I.