Sonya and Tim - he was a manager at McDonald’s but the branch closed and she worked at Subway but they cut her shifts - lost their home and moved into a small apartment, but when the unemployment money ended they lost that too.
“We slept in our car, it was scary,” says Sonya. “Then we came here.”
Larry Antista and his 14-year-old daughter Michelle are bedding down alongside 80 people they do not know. Does her school know she is homeless? “I didn’t tell them,” Michelle says. “I stay there until six o’clock to do my homework.” They lost their apartment when the family split up.
Maurice Henderson and RoseAnna Ortice are across the parquet floor with their three kids. Maurice used to manage a car dealership. They lived in a motel. The day his unemployment cheque did not arrive was the day he had to leave the motel and come here. They have been on the mattresses for two weeks.
There is wrath aplenty here - though you seldom hear such thoughts expressed on the US media. “They’re wasting money on wars,” says Larry. Maurice tells me the same thing. A guy crawls over his large family and almost whispers to me, “I’m Native American. My tribe runs a casino so where does the money go? Why don’t they use it to help their own people?”
Steinbeck, who had lived in California most of his life, had to be alerted to the existence of the camps on his doorstep by Lange’s husband, an academic, who wrote one of the first field reports of the migrant problem. Then, as now, the poor had only a walk-on part in the mass media, and their script lines seldom reflected what they actually thought.
All along Interstate 40 I have been cursing the motelscape. The inedible sludge of reconstituted egg, “biscuit” and gravy that allows them to advertise “hot breakfast” - the coffee weak enough to read the Wall Street Journal’s markets pages through.
Reynalds takes me to a line of cheap motels right by the interstate where rooms are $29 (£18) a night. “These places fill up in the first two weeks after the benefit cheques are paid and when they run out, they empty out and people drift over to Joy Junction.”
Now I see the cheap motels in a new light. This is where America’s hidden homeless live.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/world-us-canada-14296682
These people aren’t blaming Obama. These people are wanting handouts it sounds like.
The one thing I was hoping to read from the homeless is the one thing I didn’t see in the article.
“Please help me find a job”.
:-(
Not that I am informing you all of anything, but every day they make clear they will defend to the end the programs that are bankrupting our country.
When society totally breaks down, when de-urbanization is complete, when a few pounds of scrap metal is worth more than a monthly Social Security check, when the homeless and church shelters are overwhelmed, what will happen?
I know this; the people will demand the pols “do something,” and that something will resemble totalitarian control. Like almost every republic before us, we will end up in tyranny unless we stop the head first dive now.
And for a final insult to a once free people, Dingy Harry is giving a perverted lesson on the Constitutional Convention. What a SOS.