I Just Saw Something Really Sad. And Then I Got Angry.

[Newest Reality]

78. Without a permanent

address, one is only steps away from the street. Being on the edge changes your views and opinions. Your ideas of permanence, stability and even luxury change drastically after you lose it all.

In my case, I help seniors out whose fixed income does not really allow for paying for someone to help them. So, that provides no actual home, but places to sleep and eat for the time being. Luckily, internet access is also part of it and food stamps are manna.

Having met people who are in similar dire straights, (and many of us are pushing 60) it seems that you really have to let go of worrying about your future and where you might end-up once you fall out of the system. Some of the folks most effected are those whose families are gone and dead and whose friends started to find their situation "uncomfortable" and began to avoid them as they lost everything -- in other words, not really friends at all.

Being in the now and day-to-day living without knowing if tomorrow is about finding a safe place to sleep outdoors, gives you a deep insight into impermanence and starts to dissolve many notions and convenient fictions that other scenarios might encourage and support. Being present is good, but the tangles of wants and needs and your basic fears are all flammable and burn what you thought was important up. A few items become your "stuff" and maybe even more valuable and precious than the houseful of things you used to have.

The consumer society really stands-out for you as you realize you are not a true consumer who can buy what they want, but are one who subsists. Rather than retirement or plans for it, you see a potential life on the streets that will shorten what time you have left and bring you a permanent "retirement" and that will also deliver you to the only "vacation" you get, be it endless.

So, there is a lot to learn being older and doing the tight-rope walk. There are many insights as to what a consumer society that has profit as the fundamental pinion of its value system considers valuable and, if the word really applies, meaningful. In a country overflowing with the kind of wealth, products, foodstuffs and luxuries like no time in history, you can see that your own value and that of others in your position is relatively meaningless by comparison.

But then, I think about the rest of the world and wonder about the hypocrisy of those they say they value human life when a large part of the simulated machine we live in clearly does not.