High and low

It's a beautiful, clear morning in Victoria and I see from my window that the Sooke Hills are covered in snow. Walked across the Blue Bridge passing the usual bundles of discarded clothing and needle cases that littered my route. Oblivious to the beauties of the day, the "homeless" already on a prowl for the next fix are taking up their favored stations. One regular emotes his pitiful complaint, "I'm so hungry." Formerly his face was a tangle of beard and hair but last week he was shorn like a sheep and now he's not even recognizable except from his oddly stooped gait, like a tall wounded bird and his customary script. I do indeed feel pity for him and wish I could do something to help him because he is a pathetic creature who desparately needs help.
Unfortunately, he's an unpaid prop, a little bit of unwitting propaganda. As large as the drug addicted "homeless" population is, I'm sure it is dwarfed by the size of the social activist crowd who make their living off it. Formerly one of the rackets of organized crime, the shakedown has gone mainstream. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton refurbished the technique and applied a modern gloss of self-righteous anger guaranteed to provoke a cowering response among the prosperous white bourgeois who who have been conditioned to believe that everything bad that happens in the world is their very own fault. Looked at in that way, Jackson and Sharpton sell indulgences to afflicted white souls who can then continue to enjoy their BMW SUVs with a clear conscience.
Native Indians picked up the technique pretty quickly, as did the econazis. As somebody has recently pointed out more money is made off the seal hunt by environmental groups than by the hunters. The last thing the econazis want is for the seal hunt to end. How would the wreck that was Brigit Bardot still get her ravaged mug in the paper without the help of those cute baby seals? And so it goes. Where would the AIDS industry be without lots of dead queers and Africans?
But the biggest shakedown of all depends on everybody believing that free enterprise and the market economy are somehow responsible for the starving children in Biafra...or the "homeless" that clutter every downtown streetcorner. This calls for more social programs, we are scolded. And only bigger government agencies can help, for which it will be necessary to raise taxes of course. What a load of rubbish. What high taxes do is punish people for working hard. What are taxes but a way of confiscating the fruits of somebody else's labor for...the benefit of who?
Certainly not for the benefit of the hapless creature haunting the sidewalk. Whose child, brother, former schoolmate is he? I wouldn't be at all surprised if somebody somewhere still loves him. For the activists these personal details only matter as a propaganda tool. He collects a few dollars every day, enough to buy a hit of something off the scummy pusher man across the street. I would really like to follow these little trickles of cash downstream to the larger rivers and ultimately find out where the tributaries end up. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the money river from that watershed ends up in the same pockets as the the other watershed that starts with your T4 slip. There is a synergy here. The more homeless there are the more money can be collected off them or in their name. Everybody wins! Except the raggedy man on the streetcorner.
There are huge amounts of cash collected by both these methods but very little of it actually gets to this poor sot and his plight is absolutely not the fault of Walmart, MacDonalds or Halliburton. MacDonalds probably feeds more poor people than all the social agencies put together while Walmart clothes them...and it employs the poor too, teaching them how to get up in the morning and go to work, giving them a chance to get out of poverty.
And now we come to the so-called "Peace" activists. Boy, do they ever make lots of money off of war. Look at the Democratic Party in the United States. Where would they be if it weren't for American soldiers getting killed in Iraq? The worse the headlines, the better they do. No wonder Nancy Pelosi is going to Syria. She wants to give Boy Assad a great big thank you, because if it wasn't for him a lot fewer U.S soldiers would be getting killed and how would Nancy get elected and have the taxpayers pay for a jet plane and all. Possibly he has a nice big donation for her Party, too.
It's amazing how far you can go in this day and age with a compliant media and a gullible public. Doesn't say much for the educational system though.