There’s a lot of unhappiness even among the wealthy. It seems that money cannot buy everything, and what it can buy is not always available. Take, for an example, the numerous Google employees purported to be living in their cars. I’ve known about poor students doing it, and the community of full-time campers near my home, but they’re under employed. This is something different. Presumably, these Google homeless are the lucky ones; they can shower and eat at work and are probably not harassed by the police. Still, it’s hard to ignore that one of best-known tech companies on the planet has homeless employees. You gotta wonder about how the people who are chronically under-employed and have no regular income are surviving.
Sadly, this is not new. We are in a cycle, repeating a dismal fate. The Hoovervilles of the 1930s also had explosive mass migration and homelessness. But, we’ve forgotten them, or have failed to teach these lessons to our children. We think we are immune to history, even our own. Hoovervilles are created when wealth is consolidated in the hands of few. Will the government step in to correct the disparities? They can start with raising the minimum wage and taxing the wealthy. After all, people like Trump should pay their share. If not, only some of us pay of the price of inequality: it’s due every April 15th.
We could all use jobs. We all want healthcare. We all want a home to rest our bodies through the night and at the end of the day; preferably that home is dry, clean and heated with good, old-fashioned fossil fuels. The challenge to do so, for all of us, regardless of race, is tasked to our new president, a man promising to make this a great nation, again. This is a familiar moment from a historical standpoint: the mass migration of hundreds of thousands of people, looking for refuge, opportunity and peace is the same one that has driven previous generation to enact change, from the bottom up. We forget, that the people who rule our nation are the 1%, the most elite among us. We are the many.
