Homelessness in America has been a socially scandalous epidemic for some decades now.\u00a0 And, of course, not just for the current generation of immigrants.\u00a0 My spouse and I dined recently at a cheap joint a few blocks from our city home.\u00a0 As we exited into the cold January night of the northern Midwest, we ran into one of her former co-workers who had just been laid off from his pressman\u2019s job at a regional newspaper.\u00a0 We stood between our two cars in the dimly lit parking lot while the two of them chatted about their former work lives. \u00a0\u00a0My wife had been one of the newspaper\u2019s long time photographers until her retirement a few years ago.<\/p>\n
Stealing a glance now and again at the man\u2019s old Chrysler mini van, I could see sheets, a sleeping bag rolled out, and personal belongings filling the automobile\u2019s interior up to the windows.\u00a0 He had not been very many paychecks away from homelessness, and was attempting survival in the North Country winter in his van.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he was only the most recent in a series of persons rendered homeless in our area of the world.\u00a0 When I wrote THE COST OF DREAMS, I had ample images readily at hand regards human beings kicked out of their residences by the landlords and the banks.<\/p>\n
One summer as I worked on the book, I walked out into my local bank\u2019s parking lot to spot a young man on an early Saturday morning stretched out in the back of a small Ford station wagon.\u00a0 I drove home and described the scene for my family, and a friend visiting that morning knew the young fellow, who worked for a sub-survival wage at a local restaurant.<\/p>\n
In my novel, the Latin American occupants of an old rusted sedan know all of the associated problems occasioned by living in a car.\u00a0 The young children have no consistent access to proper schooling and education, which positions them for a continuance of a life of dire poverty.\u00a0 And they\u2019ve nothing for decent and dignified access to proper hygiene, to toilets, or to laundry facilities.\u00a0 Moreover, my characters know no peace, living in fear night and day of deportation and\/or jail for the simple earthly crime of hunger, and of having crossed a border to eat.<\/p>\n
In THE COST OF DREAMS, immigrants from Mexico haul a terribly wounded adult woman, who has been shot by her husband, from the southwestern US to the northern Midwest in an old automobile.\u00a0 By the time and occasion of her medical attention in the North Country, the dreadfully injured woman has crossed the mid continent paralyzed and filthy.\u00a0 Her gunshot wounds are seriously infected, and a craterous pressure sore into the fat of one buttock has achieved a diameter of over six inches from lying in the car in one position for weeks.\u00a0 These events, by the way, reflect a back-story of a homeless person I cared for at my hospital over fifteen years ago.<\/p>\n
Social problems always and forever have social roots.\u00a0 The social wealth created by working persons has been stripped out and handed to the largest banks in America, in an utter and contemptible gluttony of the financial aristocracy.<\/p>\n
It is a social disgrace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Homelessness in America has been a socially scandalous epidemic for some decades now.\u00a0 And, of course, not just for the current generation of immigrants.\u00a0 My spouse and I dined recently at a cheap joint a few blocks from our city home.\u00a0 As we exited into the cold January night of the northern Midwest, we ran […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.garystelzer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}