She is voicing the thoughts I went through when I visited LA for the first time as someone from Australia. After all this talk in the media and sports about how awesome LA is and that stars want to live there and all that crap, the fucking shock when I saw LA’s streets lined with tents of homeless people who were mostly disabled fucking threw me off so fucking hard. This was many years ago so I can only assume things are even worse. It was on the same level as some cities in third world countries, I couldn’t believe it. Really helped me become 100% skeptical of western media.
I’m from the Bay Area and we have a similiarly bad homeless problem and it was still incredibly shocking for me, and I was like born and raised here and like am used to how shitty the USA is…
I remember I was Ubering back to my hotel after a concert and it was raining pretty heavily and you just saw homeless people huddled in every single spot imaginable among the closed for the evening downtown businesses and it was just such a dystopian scene I was like what the fuck
The Bay Area is probably worse these days, seeing the Tenderloin in San Francisco would make you faint
Having seen people lying in their own piss and shit among the stunning skyline for blocks and blocks in one of the richest cities in the world makes that Parenti clip so stinging for me. I tear up at the end when he says “THEN SLEEP IN THE DOORWAYS OF THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE”
where is parenti at these days? Why is chomsky getting so much airtime and this king is nowhere to be seen?
Parenti was smart enough to retire and shut the fuck up. Guy went out on top.
I can’t imagine how much whiplash that must have given you lmfao
so I can only assume things are even worse
You know that Star Trek episode with the Bell Riots? It’s really close to that.
Timeline wise, 2 years. Materially we are WELL past the point of the episode, just not in as visually striking a way as walled of portions of every major city for the hundreds and hundreds of homeless. At least the walled cities had a degree of public housing even though it wasn’t nearly enough, there were hallways to sleep in.
I live in a smaller town where our homeless population is almost exclusively made up of couch surfers, but you do occasionally see people sleeping under bridges. One aspect of it is that there are a ton of “utility apartments” located above bars or in leased plazas where the leases are weekly and the regulations are just not enforced for whatever reason. So in effect they’re long-term hotels that you can rent for like $400 a month. They’ve got room for a single-size bed, a toilet, a little shower, and a hot plate. I know a dude who lives in one, sells stolen Marlboro’s out his window, and calls himself Mick Donalds. Super chill dude
