Last week I met a homeless woman. She was outside panhandling, and looked really cold - shivering, etc. I gave her my hat - she didn't have one - and bought her a cup of hot tea. She told me she'd been on the streets since her mother died. She was about my age.
Today, a married couple. The wife was pregnant. The husband said they'd come to Massachusetts for housing, and the apartment had been sold already by the time they got here; they'd been stranded. According to him they'd been sleeping in South Station - the guards actually let them, wonder of wonders. They hadn't eaten in a couple days, and it showed. I bought them a sandwich and hot coffee (for whatever the hell that's worth), wished them luck, and got on my train home. I'm on the train right now - kind of wondering if I could have done more.
I've been seeing more and more of this lately. Young people and married couples on the streets, more of them than I've ever seen in my life before. Not the usual boozers asking for money, but people who don't seem used to it, and who are honestly grateful for some food and a hot drink. People who are completely lost.
I feel like I've walked into a dystopia. Things have been bad before, but I've never seen it like this. The economists are saying things are getting better, and they're clearly not. America was never really the land of the free; but now it's like we've given up all pretense. The TVs in South Station are still blaring paranoid terrorism fantasies, the NSA is wiretapping everyone, and the government doesn't even give a damn that its own citizens are starving and freezing.
What the hell is happening in this country?