How America is a Cauldron of Self-Loathing, Fear and Dis-empathy Brought to us By Capitali$m

If I Don’t Feel It, The Problem Doesn’t Exist

You know we are cooked when the middling middle class, with educations from Duke, USC, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Columbia, and gobs of money in the bank, and an east coast upbringing, now California dreaming, are astonished that there are actually homeless veterans.

This is the state of the lobotomized America, one country that is a mix of Disneyland, Zombie-land, Filthy First Families, War Economics, General Anxiety Disorder gone rampant, and, well, everything one can imagine the White Race (sic) has become under the crystal meth bubble of money, debt, TV, Netflix, Cowboys and Indians Entertainment, and a population in a dervish of debt spiral while the hooked-brained Point Zero Zero Zero One Percent has us as slaves.

On the surface, everything looks fine in America when zipping down the streets of LA, Seattle, Phoenix, Atlanta, if one wants to believe normality is that baseline of gutters full of 7-11 hot dog wrappers, millions of miles of strip malls with attendant boarded up storefronts, smoke-pot-booze-armament-nickel and dime shops, concrete, tar, 300,000,000 cars pushing and pulling people to precarious jobs and off-the-clock mortgaged lives, and the endless serpents of 18-wheelers crisscrossing America with the goods of depravity, obsolescence, and despair.

It’s a blitzkrieg of sound bites, biting hatred toward anyone different than that narrow creepy species of white people with kids and two homes depicted on TV. The white race, even though it is shrinking, is like a plague. It takes only a few microbes to disease a pond with cholera, and it only takes a few whites in a board room or in a bureaucracy or corporation to turn the air to putrid, disease-causing sickness, where punishment is measured in how much the few can take from the many.

So I go back to the astonishment of friends and relatives on the West Coast, Southern Cal: How can there be homeless veterans . . . as if the only veterans in the minds of these upper middle class are four-star triple-dipping multimillionaire generals, or Ollie North types selling their filthy Christo-Zio murderous brand of America to FOX, the NRA and some glass church on the hill making profits from private prison hell.

We are talking about 50 K veterans homeless, hundreds of thousands basically screwed because of the enormous disabilities for which the time spent “serving” has exacted as the second and third level of punishment this sadistic system of indoctrinating people into believing they are doing anything for the country (not) in the form of pushing around dirt, cranking wrenches, tooling around in this disgusting excess of overpriced dangerous polluting equipment that literally takes food out of the mouths of babes and grannies.

Then the millions of veterans hobbling around with herniated discs, diabetes, dead knees, metal hips, PTSD, rotting teeth, a thousand varieties of internal injuries, diseases and maladies. And we pay dearly in this structural violent land of Bernie Sanders’ pet F-35 project, or McCain’s aircraft carriers, or Filthy Trump’s “we make the best stuff, the very best guns and missiles and killer jets and bombs in the whole world, the best . . .” and untold bio-chem-putridity created by the US Armed Forces.

I attempt to tell these la-la land folk that even one base, Camp Lejeune, killed thousands of military and civilians from 30 years of contaminated water exposure that was covered up by those big brass officers, generals and retired triple-dipper civil servants. They guffaw, and then eyes glaze over when I repeat there are 130 other US-based military compounds that are toxic dumps.

Brother can you spare a dime is sister can you spare a tooth extraction

This is the lead up into my work, daily the stories and the crises, the onion peeled back, multiple bizarre incidents in the veterans’ lives. Bombarded with not only propaganda, but shock waves, chemicals, murder teams like the Phoenix Program or MK-Ultra or DARPA, you name it, the things these many times economically-drafted people have endured would rip the souls from most of the middling ones, the flag wavers and cocktail umbrella twirling Republicans and Democrats.

The filthy Trumps and Don’s entourage and millions upon millions of Kool-Aid drinkers, believers, deplorables, oh, they are, whether they are calling themselves stock brokers or sausage makers, when you lick the shoes of this sort of filthy fellow, we know we have slipped in our insanity – from all these other bastions like Ike, Truman, Nixon, Bush, Ford, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Carter, hell, these are cutouts of the two parties for which they flip billions and billions of shekels in the name of the corporate Satans.

Here I am, in the richest country in the world (ha, ha) in the weirdest town in the USA, Portland, Oregon, where the influx of money from California has turned this into a winter and summer playground for the 20 Percent with thousands of homeless in tents along freeway off-ramps, kids with heroin track lines intertwined with tattoos selling trinkets, thousands of people in drug recovery programs, and an army of civil servants and social services personnel making shitty livings off of some really shitty shitty situations.

We have this Pacific Northwest billionaire and millionaire club, the Boeings and Alaska Airlines and Intels and Nikes and Amazons and thousands of companies that give shit about the near homeless, the houseless, the struggling ones their own shitty companies hire on to do the heavy labor and mindless digital shuffling required in this usury and punishment world of the Goldman Sachs prostitutes.

I can rail on and on, but the reality is, punks like me could change the world, with just the right marketing, connections, exposures, moments of epiphany, conversations with the right person at the right time at the right place, etc.

Think 20- or thirty-acre venues, in the forests around Mount Adams and Mount Hood, anywhere in this PNW, where we could, with the right funding, get tiny homes built with sweat equity, around communal all-purpose rooms-kitchens-gathering points. Homes with toilets (compostable), solar arrays, and gardens circling this mix, and then, well, hundreds upon hundreds of these with tens of thousands of people, mixed races, mixed ideas, mixed ages, supporting each other. Ebenezer Howard comes to mind, oh those Garden Cities, but with a 21st century punch. School buses, ready for the crusher, retrofitted for homes, that is, college kids and high schoolers and Pk8 working to learn the tricks of working with hands, design, construction, art, engineering, food growing, and social services.

This organic concentric circle of tiny homes, cabins, containers, school buses, like a giant sunflower, with other circles and rings of gardens, livestock pens, work arenas, amphitheaters.

It could be done in five years. Land is plentiful. We have these creeps at Google wanting self-driving vans, buses, so get their billionaire butts involved – shuttles for those veterans and non-veterans getting to hospitals, or, better yet, do the Stan Brock (Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom sidekick) thing of Remote Area Medical and have docs, dentists, PAs, shrinks, gerontologists, child social workers, holistic healers, naturopaths, et al. I can give the links below, but the stories and solutions have already been written, for sure, and if it takes these thieves like Musk-Tesla and Bezos and Buffet and Walton and Gates and the countless gluttons, war profiteers, the scabs of humanity – industrial military-finance-education-ag-energy-legal-IT-prison-insurance-retail complex – to fund it, voluntarily, or with a Eugene Debs reality, then so be it.

Here’s the segue into one example of a veteran at the place where I work who could be the Johnny Appleseed or Pied Piper of this project, going to the captains of industry, the colonels of Wall Street and the generals of filthy rich wealth with a dervish of a man like me showing the plans and crunching the numbers.

Who’s Giving this Guy Right Out of a Quadruple Hollywood Script the Time of Day?

I will call him Stephen. He’s in the homeless shelter a second time. The first time, man, a few years ago, he was here, with a lot of sobriety under his belt, but, he ended up at a 7-11, loaned out some money to a friend, and then bam, the friend offered to pay back the loan with crystal meth. Stephen, living in our shelter, which is family and sober based, jumped out the window to not embarrass himself or put the program at risk.

From 1977 to ’82, 82nd Airborne. He did the radical macho stuff, in the Army, and he tells me that he always wanted to be in the military, since age 10. Northern California roots, athlete, family with military history – Army, Navy, Marines. He worked in a trailer factory in high school, and other outfits.

The drinking started in the Army. Guys back from Vietnam as company leaders, with plethora of drug abuse, drinking, and hell, the Army barracks had beer machines installed next to cots. The 82nd Airborne then, Stephen says, was called “The Jumping Junkies.”

He bounced around after military, working at Bank of America, married and divorced. Biker clubs (gangs) and things got hard when his son was murdered by the mother’s (his ex) boyfriend. That’s when the anger set in, and the drugs, but he ended up being a number one supervisor for construction sites building Wal-marts and the other box stores. Six figures, and, he ended up owning his own company, 12 acre plot of land and home he paid cash for. He moved up to even higher pay doing supervision of hospital construction and refab sites, in California, and earthquake mitigation.

A functional cocaine-speed-methamphetamine abuser with a lot of anger but more compassion. Prison terms for selling, a few property crimes, no violence.

He counts homelessness in years, living in storm drains, living out of dumpsters, and even told me about waking up many times with a piece of drop cloth covering him and snow packed on top of that.

He looks like a cross between Tommy Lee Jones and Scott Glenn. He talked of turning 60 in September. He’s strong, and counts his lucky stars his body held up.

Now, he makes $3000 a month, and that’s from his service connected disabilities. He is on his road to 23 months sober, and before he came back to our shelter, he was 31 days living in the forest parks around Portland that are such a draw for those same Californians who think there is no way in hell a veteran can be homeless.

Stephen’s got all the elements in this day and age of flash in the pan so-called business leaders. He has the biographical narrative that shows how some people can go from here to there back to there, hit rock bottom a few times, almost bite the dust, get criminally involved, let the drugs be the monkey on the back, and, then, bam, the spirit takes him.

He goes to Narcotics Anonymous, is a member of a local church, takes other vets belongings to their new digs, and he’s shooting for community college in the fall for an AAS degree in alcohol and chemical dependency, and he wants the BA, and more.

A tailored shirt to display his buff frame, short-sleeved to show the tattoos, and boots and new jeans and a briefcase, and, rolled up site plans for these garden villages, and the right knock-knock-knock to Bill and Melinda, or Oprah, or, whomever.

The problem in America, though, as Stephen and I talk, are the doors – which doors, how to get to those doors, and in many cases the rich and powerful hide behind a house of mirrors with all sorts of false doors. Too many middlemen and middlewomen, too many great pretenders, too many self-absorbed so-called community leaders and heads of non-profits.

You Go to Jail to Get Mental and Addiction Help!@?#

Hell, head clerk at the prison, completion of a robust program in Portland, Bridges to Change, volunteering, peer support training, volunteering at the labor force office helping recently released prisoners with resumes and finding housing for the bottom of the barrel ex-cons – those charged and time served for sexual offenses.

I keep being told I am where I am at – precarious, job to job, old now, on the far edge of power – because I piss people off, because I call a spade a spade, and that I can’t accept baby steps and the power of the offensives this white supremacist country sets forth upon the land. True.

The mantel is Stephen’s, and I might just be an idea generator, a big bag of hot air blowing ideas and criticisms and theoretical platitudes so far out of sync with the language of punishment and dog-kill-dog capitalism, that I am in la-la land.

So, this is how Stephen got sober the last time, two years ago – he jumped out the window his shared bedroom of the shelter, wandered for a few hours, and then, exactly 48 hours later, he went into a Subway, grabbed a milk from the fridge, plopped it on the counter, and told the attendant, “This is a robbery. Call the police.”

Stephen proceeded to put the milk back, and, waited for the cops. Attempted robbery, and a rap sheet, so two years inside a minimum-security penitentiary taking every available class in cognitive behavioral therapy and anger management and addiction recovery.

He’s the guy that could manage these garden villages, training any number of people how to lead, how to design and implement the building and construction and maintenance of the villages. One village at a time, times 5 or 20.

While these fat-cats invest in parasitic capitalism, investing in yachts and gold faucets to their penthouses. While these thugs with billions crusade across the land to smear us, the working class, attack us, those with a collectivism that would outperform any of their deceptive tricks to triple bookkeeping and felonious investments and punishment spread across the seas in their transnational capital crypto-currency Mafioso.

Brother, can you spare a million people? Sister, can you spare a few million young people from the endless toil of the fulfillment centers (sic) and kill-your-self-slowly Gig Economy.

Howard’s socialist vision of garden cities tied to the people and cultural implications of these thriving communities over the spatial holism of the cities/towns: Article. The Veterans Community Project (VCP) is on a mission to eliminate Veteran homelessness by providing transitional-housing and enabling access to exceptional 360-degree service solutions. Focusing first on the Greater-Kansas City area, VCP aspires to use Kansas City as the blueprint for achieving similar successes in cities across the United States. VCP has a long-term goal of eliminating Veteran homelessness nationwide. For many years, it has been tough to find a way to house the homeless. More than 3.5 million people experience homelessness in the United States each year, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Shortages of low-income housing continue to be a major challenge. For every 100 households of renters in the United States that earn “extremely low income” (30 percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments available, according to a 2013 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Source: Yes! Magazine. Remote Area Medical (RAM) is a major nonprofit provider of mobile medical clinics. Our mission is to prevent pain and alleviate suffering by providing free, quality healthcare to those in need. We do this by delivering free dental, vision, and medical services to underserved and uninsured individuals. RAM’s Corps of more than 120,000 Humanitarian Volunteers–licensed dental, vision, medical, and veterinary professionals–have treated more than 740,000 people and 67,000 animals, delivering $120 million worth of free health care services.