Note From Underground.

And you look around and begin to realize how absolutely intangible this whole idea of "social justice" really turns out to be. At the HSP meeting the crazy marionette woman who runs the program would hardly let anyone get a word in edgewise and it was though she was incapable of processing information in any real or helpful manner. She just kept saying the same things over and over and acting as though this potential funding cut was the most impossibly dire scenario to ever exist, and the blowhole from United Way was there, he started talking and all I heard was buzz words. He has eyes like beachstones, the kind that make you feel as though you're looking into glass and there is really no one on the other side seeing you. He kept harping on about how "this was the type of program that filled an immediate emergency need, United Way will certainly have funds for it and we are experimenting with a new format and just write something up and present it to the board, that's all." And at this news the plastic woman began to grovel and I thought that perhaps I was actually watching live sketch comedy. Who calls the shots?

Who says that this is important, and that isn't? And do these people actually follow through and learn anything about the programs and agencies that they so readily pigeon hole? Is there really anything other than the application of bandaids. The people who need HSP are the people who goofed off in school or spent all their time in the office because they couldn't control their tempers are the people whose parents have been clients for eleventeen years are the people who decided to get married at the age of seventeen to someone who had no high school diploma are the people could recite to you what public assitance agencies exist and for whom better than even Anne could. And so I pigeon hole too. Social Justice. The chasm is too huge, between the givers and the takers. The givers are the ones standing up on marble pedestals, hands outstretched, thinking themselves to be quite holy indeed. And the takers are the average joes who couldn't even pass english 101. Couldn't get to their construction job without a morning nip. We don't even know the names of our neighbors in this society where madness prowls, how can we hope to help anyone when common decency and random kindness with no thought to a quid pro quo has become almost a non-existent entity. We don't even know who's hungry. We close our doors, all of us. And though I employ hyperbole, this system is nothing if not flawed, we'll never get anywhere this way. We're just keeping ourselves afloat. Using the materials to bail out a ruptured craft instead of redesigning. Our efforts are misdirected and not enough. And I have no idea of how to fix it.