'Tis the season

Oh, the places you won't go if you're poor or homeless in America:

• Just for shits and giggles (hard to see any other reason for it) schools across America are denying children--children--lunches because their parents are too far in debt on their lunch tabs (in some cases as little as $20).  Hungry, Hungry Hippos takes on real life meaning.
• Fort Lauderdale, FL (their city motto:  "We're Fucking Heartless"), home of a law which prohibits the feeding of the homeless, last month arrested a ninety year old man for feeding the homeless.  You cannot make this shit up.
• Just to prove they really are fucking heartless, Fort Lauderdale officials last month also arrested a homeless man for speaking out against their policies during a ceremony to honor, of all things, National Homeless Week.  Proving mightily once again the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.
• Even though it's been an abysmal failure in Tennessee, Utah, and Florida both in terms of its cost and its ability to find much of any poor people using drugs, numbnuts Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wants to drug test everyone in his state who collects unemployment or receives food stamps...just so Wisconsin can join the list the failures, too, and  he can appeal to the haters among the republican party faithful in his quest to not be America's next President.  Not bad enough that Wisconsin's poor have to put up with the worst fucking haircut in American politics, they also have to pee in a cup to assuage his Presidential ambitions.
• The city of Manteca, CA recently passed an ordinance (joining a long list of other American cities trying to make being homeless a crime) making it illegal for the homeless to sleep outside.  Hello--homeless=no place to live=no place to sleep other than outside.  The city's police chief noted that if the homeless wanted to leave, it would be their choice.  No it isn't--sleeping isn't a choice, it's a necessity.

The lone bright spot I've been able to find over the past few weeks is that the city of Dallas decided to stop trying to prohibit those feeding the homeless in public and agreed to pay $250,000 in settlement to those charities.

In the movie It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter at one point calls helping the least among us "sentimental hogwash."  At the time, his character's lack of empathy was considered villainous.

Now it's public policy.

Peace,

emaycee