I always wondered

[mqbush]

I always wondered how they got by in the winter. You could look clear through their houses, smoke-blackened rough boards with gaps between on a mounded, packed-earth floor. At least the homes of the white were sheathed with metal Coca Cola signs, the prerogative of rank. Without this arbitrary edge life is unnecessarily harder.

I didn’t see how the residents of the windowed and lighted working-class houses, or the rococo mansions nearer to town worked any harder than their poorer neighbors. I didn’t see the moral superiority that merited such financial reward for some. It looked capricious and unjust.

Yet “the foundations of this economy are sound,” this economy that doles out its rewards to the already wealthy and has never looked into the shelter of the poor.