It’s 1.3 miles from my house to the gym located in the heart of WEHO. A walk up La Cienega Blvd a left on Santa Monica Blvd and wham bam thank you Ma’am 24 Hour Fitness, the gym that accepts Silver Sneakers, and thanks to the government it pays for my membership. If I walk fast its about 12 minutes a little slower maybe 18 minutes, but hey its great pre workout cardio preparing me for the gym. Its Sunday and the usual hubbub of people and traffic is less, and most folks out on this warm LA day are strolling, seeing the sites, no destination in mind, just a leisurely gavotte on the Boulevard. What do you know, right in front of Kitchen 24 a popular eatery with great views of people causing the hood, some caucasian male had the nerve to be shirtless with his underwear peeking through ripped shorts, lying face down on the sidewalk! He had a plastic black bag filled with used plastic bottles and some aluminum cans, mostly spilled on the sidewalk sitting next to some kind of rag, which I suppose at one time was his T-shirt. He was alive as if anyone stopped to look, as I did, you could see a slow but steady heave ho from his lungs as they must have pressed hard against the cement while he was asleep. His upper torso hugged the curb, his legs forming a V lingered on most of the sidewalk. Who the fuck did he think he was to usurp a main sidewalk located in the business district of WEHO, on a Sunday of all days. I wanted to do something, call 911 and as i took out my phone a waiter from Kitchen 24, said they called 911 about half an hour ago, and were told this was not an emergency and police would arrive as soon as possible. How inconvenient, now people on their phones not looking where they were walking had to trip over him or actually place the phone next to their body as they maneuvered around this arrogant selfish homeless man finding some respite on a cold concrete sidewalk.
It must be this guys fault, after all he made the decision to be homeless. Maybe if he had spent the $3 he had somehow been provided by passerby’s on the 700 Club, calling Pat Robertson to speak to Jesus, he might be up and walking around. Maybe if he tuned into the Joel Osteen Program and made a payment towards one more acre of a religious tower, God would have rewarded him with a better T-Shirt. Or maybe if only he accept4ed Jesus as his Lord and Savior, he would have never taken to either alcohol, drugs or unemployment. And maybe if he didn’t live in California a state where Ronald Reagan, trying to save money, passed a law stating that the poor and mentally ill have all the right to be as poor or mentally ill as they wish. Surely THIS shirtless guy laying face down in his own drool, with his underwear showing sowed his own miserable roots, and it ain’t nobody’s problem but his. Its Trump America where the good things happen to bad people, and good people are considered bad because, they just don’t want to fit in.
Who have we become, America. How come the Village is no longer responsible for its inhabitants. Why do we feel superior knowing there will be someone less fortunate then we. Is this the new norm, to trip over bodies lying in the streets? As I recall when the nazi’s set up the Jewish Ghetto’s in Europe, sane people, became insane ignoring the most insidious of behaviors and actually helping the nazi’s to establish the jews as the monsters and low life Hitler envisioned.
