Law enforcement in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, unironically upset by their state’s supreme court ruling last year that ordinances prohibiting panhandling are actually unconstitutional, are electing to litter their neighborhoods with signs posted requesting that the public take it upon themselves to deny those in need any assistance. The local Fox affiliate’s coverage of the story, linked here, accomplishes the expected of demonizing the poor, even insinuating the act of begging to be a get rich quick scheme. And of course to the same end do they also quote local police in generalizing homeless as addicts and junkies. Vilifying the poor is the original form of victim-shaming, but we cannot expect modern day bible-belters to grasp that connection. They read more Facebook memes than they do scripture.
And outright criminalizing the poor, the true aim of law enforcement both here and abroad, is at once inhuman and inhumane. The blanket, adamant insistence of most bosses to pay late and/or less than agreed, or to altogether avoid any payment, whether fair pay or not? Self-important landlords proving to be as shady as any businessman, using and abusing anybody desperate enough to need a roof over their head? How dare the poors suffer the consequences! If these homeless, starving wretches could just do as everyone else and lie, cheat and steal to their heart’s content then they would not have to selfishly settle for the short end of the stick. They could instead humbly have it all. Irony is lost.
Meanwhile, in the same country, Apple has become the first multinational corporation to reach the fabled trillion-dollar market cap. And in the days since have they been widely celebrated for such smashing, greedy success. The same Apple that stores 90% of its wealth overseas in a megalithic tax evasion scheme enabling itself to avoid paying even half of its state and federal taxes long owed. Earlier in 2017, the non-profit and non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy published results of an in-depth study which confirmed that the 35% corporate tax rate in the USA, contrary to the cacophony of rule-bending gripes of right-leaning Neoconservative and Neoliberal politicians aplenty, is a total myth, with most of the larger corporations enjoying so many loopholes created exclusively for them (sometimes even writing the laws themselves) that they actually pay little to no federal taxes. So, as the rotten to the core Apple is currently celebrated for becoming the richest enterprise worldwide, I firmly believe that anybody possessing an iTunes account despite the public knowledge of the company’s outsourced jobs pushing dozens of workers into suicide nets, is a knave in the most condescending connotations fathomable.
The common practice maintained by Uncle Toms since ancient times of seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil is nothing but a matter of willfully making one’s self deaf, dumb and blind. But for what end exactly?
And it’s become decidedly easy for the American public to turn a blind eye, when they spend almost half their time faced with digital media. Nobody forces them to seek out entertaining distractions from the actual world, distractions kindly provided by Apple and similar power-mongering, technological feudalists. Even while those same numbers announce themselves in other studies as lonely and displaced by the tomfoolery they choose to obsess over. The ones profiting by any means from this arrangement are expressly one and the same as those who are proactively cultivating the mess to begin with, the ones idolized for robbing the world blind of their senses while producing nothing but this assembly line of DIY defeat and homelessness.
British press is reporting how half of admissions officers believe students are not arriving to universities sufficiently prepared, explicitly because of the shallow laziness generated by a culture where googling rather than learning has become the societal norm. It’s even becoming a thing where parents are paying strangers to show their kids how to beat video games. As though even mindless indulgence is too demanding for a slave caste quite purposefully bred into existing as another beast entirely from mindfulness. Shame is lost. The French may be toying with banning students under the age of 15 from bringing smart-phones to class, but this is an act of minutiae not mutiny, being too trifling a thing to provoke any real or lasting effects against the elephant in the room where generations Y and Z are already crazy-glued into one-size-fits-all VR headsets pre-programmed to first-person-shooter the unholy hell out of that elephant and the room just like the weirdos their moms gave their allowance to illustrated.
Apparently there is to be a modernized theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank, re-purposed to showcase the painfully obvious commonalities faced by the girl’s family during the holocaust and those faced by refugees and immigrants in the USA today. The responses online are maddening, as sampled by this yokel:
Some people, by all accounts, should really try reading sometime, reading anything other than entertainment portals or Facebook memes. Such as even mainstream right-wing sites which ironically find no qualm in casually acknowledging the many tens of thousands of persons alive today victimized by the hero-worshiped bosses of that yokel’s own ideology of agreeably seeing no evil, hearing no evil or speaking no evil. It’s precisely the same lot of pridefully complacent bible-belters who see no irony or shame in picking and choosing which of their own dogma to pay attention to; a far cry from the invitation of St. Paul in 2 Cor 8:9-15: “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich”.
But if the prick who signs their cheques or the prick waving a flag at them or the prick they want to suck off says otherwise, then damn it all and let god sort it out as though an imaginary friend doesn’t have enough on their plate already, what with stomaching the existential nihilism to surely come from the all-knowing knowing itself to be a drafted by committee, fictitious premise. Like everything else in this world beyond our sun-dried hearts on sleeve.