I had written about the sheer magic which is the city of LA on a Sunday morning, at 6:00 am. I walk our little dog Chance, and this week as an added bonus, I am babysitting my daughter’s dog, Maya. So here we were the three of us, enjoying the quiet, not yet too humid and hot weather. The original blue of the sky, sadly tinted with the oranges and browns of the fires burning wildly just north of us, but still the sense that even in a city as loud and significant, as crowded and contrived as the city of angels, peace has a place to settle. The mistake I made today, was to walk an extra block north and find myself on Melrose Avenue, a central east-west thoroughfare which during the day I avoid unless Godzilla is roaming the side streets. But it is Sunday, the quiet so deafening it is soothing, and the Angeleno’s are still asleep, so I am confident the sidewalks are mine alone, I mean ours alone. But then, the daydream of just being fades into a shouting match between three homeless individuals, and their friends, who must have been imaginary or just invisible to my eyes. One man with torn clothing with walking with a zig-zag gate, taking him from the sidewalk to Melrose Avenue. Another whose pants perhaps need only a belt or rope to keep them on his very skinny hips is digging into trash cans, sipping whatever liquid had remained at the bottom of the container. And the third man is about two blocks from the two other men, cursing them a long life in Hell, which from my perspective, they have already arrived. Chance and Maya are busy sniffing the perfumes left on the ground from the night before and of course are unaware of the behavior of three human beings, whose lives, from my perspective, once again, just my point of view, seems sad and empty, but still with the possibilities of a future, with more promise and less pain.
And then the anger, welling inside of me, since the advent of Trump and his lack of empathetic policies toward anyone but himself, and the hypocritical double speak of the Republican party, supposedly the moral conscience political party, rose to power almost as dangerous as of a dictator…IMAGINE, I spoke out loud, if the same effort to enrich, the wealthy with tax breaks, to increase the profits for Corporations, the energy, and enthusiasm to hide money inside the dark, dank spaces where off-shore accounts linger like dripping lime on a rusted pipe…IMAGINE, if the same concern of making the Capitalistic lives of the 1 or 2% better had EVER been used to actually help the poor, the addicted, the hungry, what a better nation, what a better population of people we might actually be at this time in the history of the world!
It is not just the homeless addicted mentally ill folk in LA, but the kids growing up in Kentucky, where, it seems the Coal Companies are permitted to pollute the rivers with coal ash (Of course clean coal ash., It is the families of Flint. It is the elderly either hidden in their one-room flats or placed in county homes where abuse and disadvantage are part of the price of getting old and being poor! Imagine, if all of the Congressmen paid back the money the government provided to fight their sexual abuse cases, if all of the Trump Cabinet members, past and present from Scott Pruitt, Wilbur Ross, Ben Carson, Tom Price, Steve Mnuchin actually paid back the money they stole from the treasury for their own personal benefits. IMAGINE if Betsy Devos, Elaine Chao removed their hidden tax-free profits from the Seychelles Deutsche bank, and paid their share of taxes….AND IMAGINE if any member of the Trump/Kushner family actually cared enough to support this nation’s economy instead of they're own self-serving privately held funds located most likely in China or Russia.
I usually love my early Sunday morning dog walking moments, but with everything Trump happening, every bit of corruption and crime passing as the norm, every arrogant attack against minorities, the poor, the elderly, people with disabilities, and witnessing REAL HUMAN beings suffering, today’s excursion was one of melancholy and I grew mad…MAD, because none of this is anything but man-made.
