Rambling on about the poor

The storm hit some towns downstate but didn’t have much an effect here, well trees were blown down and all, and I guess the biggest effect was that they made everybody in the stands at the Bears game huddle in the concourse and delayed the game for an hour or two, but in the end the Bears won.

You know we have never discussed sports, I remember you saying in some of our earlier letters that you thought sports was stupid so I never brought it up. Myself I am a Cub fan and a Bears fan when they are winning and likewise the Bulls, and on those rare occasions when Illinois is in some kind of playoffs or bowl I will root for them. But that, as sports fans go, is pretty mild. It’s just a game and someone will win and someone will lose, and the world will pretty much go on as it has before. Unless the Cubs go to the world series, but that will never happen in my lifetime, or probably anybody else’s either.

The towers do sway and shake and shudder too from time to time, but not enough to knock anything off a shelf. I used to notice it a lot more often when I first moved in, but I can’t remember anymore the last time I noticed it. But storms are magnificent at this height with great sheets of rain plummeting down the side of the building across the street and then boiling out across the river.

Because you and your cranky reactionary allies will never let us have the socialist paradise we dream of there will always be some people richer than others and so there will always be the poor.

But I agree with you there is no true measure of who is poor and who is not. Is it a dollar amount, is it a percentage, do we need to vary it for places that are cheaper and more expensive to live? And of course we need to vary those things from time to time as conditions change. And then everytime we alter our standards we find that poverty has gone up or down by so many percentage points, but nothing on the ground has changed.

The democrats, being the party of big government solving problems, is more likely to take up the issue of poverty. They kind of set up a thing where they are the generous good guys lending a helping hand and the republicans are the selfish bad guys unwilling to help their fellow man. And the republicans are inclined to bring up that culture of dependency thing and claim that they are actually helping the poor people gain self sufficiency by giving them nothing, and by the way, voter, that is money out of your pocket going to the poor.

Both sides are being hypocritical I think. It’s kind of like being against winter. It will always be there so what can you do? Well you could buy a coat. Maybe there is such a thing as liberal guilt. I am quite comfortable here in my warm tower this windy morning, but when I see some bum walking down below in a raggedy coat, I don’t feel so good anymore. Maybe the guy is just some wino who doesn’t want to work and spends all his money on muscatel, or maybe he has some kind of mental problem, or maybe he is just down on his luck. But you know, even if he is just a wino, he is still cold out there in the wind, and, I admit it, I feel his pain.

And I guess I accuse the reps of feeling nothing but a warm satisfaction on seeing this guy thinking, ha, serves him right for being a lazy bum. Surely there are some who do, but most probably don’t. Well, I don’t know. I will leave it there for now.

What was the trauma of winging the deer? If I look at it one way, the deer gets to keep its life, and Beagles, since he is only allowed to bag so many (two?) a year, gets to go out hunting, which he loves to do, again. Seems like a win-win. On the other hand (There is always another hand. What if humans had evolved with one arm and thus one hand? What would we have to talk about all day?), some poor deer suffered a wound for no reason, and another deer will have to die to fill Beagle’s larder, and Beagles will have to sit in that cold little shed another day in order to fill the larder. One thing I am never clear on, is hunting fun, like shooting golf, or is it more like a job, like going to work in the paper mill?

How is the music going?