File this under "What Happens When We Let the Rich Remain in Power?": Inhumane Treatment of People In Our Major Cities by the Highest Power of the Land

It is class inequality that creates drug addicts and homeless people, and the rich create and defend class inequality. But gee whiz, what could the solution possibly be?

The news article reports:

“Washington, D.C. officials, backed by the Trump administration, have begun dismantling homeless encampments across the city, leaving many unhoused residents displaced with nowhere to go. The latest sweep near the Lincoln Memorial saw tents bulldozed and belongings cleared as activists, faith leaders, and advocates condemned the actions as inhumane. While the White House frames the purge as a bid to “restore beauty and safety,” critics say it ignores the root causes of homelessness and puts vulnerable people at greater risk.”

The various experts in academia and government may write detailed reports about the cause of drug addiction and homelessness (not to mention the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza), but if they dare to state the obvious cause—class inequality instead of egalitarian social relations and hence rule by the rich who treat the have-nots like dirt routinely—they lose their funding and commit career-suicide; so they never write the simple and obvious truth. This keeps the rich happy, of course.

Regarding drug addiction, I highly recommend you read this book about it:

The author writes:

While drug use rates are pretty similar across classes (and often, actually lower among the poor), addiction—like most other illnesses—is not an equal-opportunity disorder. Like cancer and heart disease, it is concentrated in the poor, who have far less access to healthy diets and consistent medical care.

The rich want the poor to be out of their sight¹:

• hidden away in factories and offices and mines and farms where they work to make the rich richer, or

• essentially invisible as janitors and cleaners of ritzy hotels and office buildings, or

• camouflaged in military uniforms obeying orders to kill anybody who threatens the power of the rich anywhere, or

• standing unobtrusively somewhere out of sight at Home Depot parking lots begging for a few hours of work to survive another day, or

• waiting patiently at a welfare office to beg for some money to live on and explaining to the authority there that they are indeed working to make the rich richer, or at least trying to do so, as required by the laws made of, by and for the rich, or

• personally serving the rich as invisibly as possible as domestic servants or butlers or chauffeurs or body guards.

But the poor are not allowed to “inflict” their presence on the eyeballs of the rich who are trying to enjoy the otherwise beautiful places in our major cities. Oh no!

Nobody with at least half a brain in their head seriously believes that in an egalitarian society—one in which the real power is held by the people who truly honor the Golden Rule, in which people use genuine democracy to shape all of society by their values of no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid and justice and fairness and truth and in which people really can prevent the abuse of power—there would be lots of homeless people and drug-addicted people living under bridges or in tents on the streets as is the case today. Nobody!

So, on the assumption that you do have more than half a brain in your head and that your livelihood does not depend of pretending that you have only half a brain in your head (I offer my sincere sympathy if your livelihood does depend on this), I encourage you to read the following two recently-written essays of mine:

“Yes! It Is Difficult to Remove the Rich from Power and It Will Likely Take a Long Time. No! That Is Not a Persuasive Reason for Only Doing Things that CANNOT EVER Remove the Rich from Power. Let's think carefully about what moral people today should do, given the reality of the world we live in.”

“People Don't Get On a Bus If They Don't Know Where It's Going. Ditto re Joining a Social Movement: Knowing what kind of a world we are FOR is as important as knowing what injustices we're against.”

Here’s what you can do.

Your call.

1. Or else, like the Palestinians in Gaza, made to be a very visible example of the extreme suffering that the rich will inflict on the have-nots, as part of the ‘shock and awe’ strategy of the rich.