This is day 4 of my new job. It's also the second day of walking in the rain to get from my office to the train. The rain doesn't scare a lot of people away. I'm lucky that my grandmother loaned me her umbrella. Just In Case. But I looked at my fellow commuters. Some had umbrellas, but a majority didn't give a fuck about having the sky cry on them.
You know who doesn't give a flying fuck about rain? The homeless. Rain or shine they're in their regular spot on their regular street. I cross the river to get to work from the train station to my office building. On my way in to work I see the guy who says good morning to everyone. There's the guy who peddles Streetwise. There's the guy who rattles his cup of change, the same guy who keeps taking change from his pocket to put into the cup so it seems like we all gave him something to rattle. There's the elderly woman who begs for help. There's the young couple who need drug money and aren't afraid to lie about it.
They're out there rain or shine.
On my way back to the train station their positions change, but they're the same people. The guy who rattles his cup. The young couple. The guy with Streetwise is gone, but everyone else is here. Instead of wishing everyone a good morning, they're wishing everyone a goodnight.
They are ignored. Maybe with good reason. I've known some homeless people over the course of my life, and from my understanding that's their lifestyle. It's horrible, but they don't want to change. They've found what they believe to be their place in the world. They have no hope. They just want to make it through another day.
So is Trump going to help these people? Is Clinton? Or any third party candidate who will never make it because the system is against them?
The system is made to be against certain people. Those homeless people you see on the streets will never find a place in our world. Maybe they don't want to. It's possible and likely from the interactions I've had. But here's the thing: the system is geared against them. Even if they wanted to be better they couldn't.
Look at our criminal system. People who have made a lot of piss-poor decisions in their youth can never recover to the point of getting a good job. No one wants to hire a felon or even someone who has committed a misdemeanor. No one believes people can change. Maybe that's fair. I know a lot of people who dug their own graves and don't know why they can't better themselves.
But fuck it. We should give people a chance. They might surprise us. They might transcend their place in the universe. They might even become paragons of society. You won't ever know until you give it a try.
I think mostly of a friend of mine. He grew up in a horrible place. His father was a psycho war vet. He got a Section 8 release, just like my step father. Except this guy was worse. He used to bury his son alive as punishment. It drove my friend crazy. I love him, and maybe that's the only reason he hasn't gone batshit crazy 100%.
He has IED as a result. This essentially means that no one will ever give him a job. Doctors will give him all sorts of drugs, but he'll never be able to make his way through the world. I liken him to Jody in PREACHER. So many terrible things happened to him in his youth that he swore that no one would ever make him a bitch for the rest of his life. He learned how to beat the mortal shit out of people at a second's notice. There is no one tougher than him that I know of. He unleashes his fury on anyone who has wronged him to the point where, well, he's been arrested again.
Our system is broken. It gives offenders ZERO chance. If you fuck up, you're out of our society forever.
It could have happened to me. I was arrested for DUI a while back. That's bad enough for anyone to ostracize me. I was lucky and was found not guilty. Very few people had that kind of luck.
Be careful who you ostracize. They could help society in the long run. Or they could kick the everloving shit out of you. Remember: we are a melting pot. We can find strengths in unlikely places. That's why we're supposed to be so forgiving of each other. Or we can just do shit as we always have. Business as usual. Let's march into our own destruction.
Or maybe not, yeah? Let's do something different. If we can.
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