As much to move the front page along as to re-focus the conversation on pan-handling,  I thought it would be useful to share a couple of links to recent stories that deal with other cities’ attempts to address the question.

First, is Boise, Idaho, where the ACLU has initiated legal action against the City over the imposition of an anti-panhandling ordinance.

Then, there is the town of Hudson, NH which is grappling with its own attempts at imposing an anti-panhandling ordinance.

That’s as far as I looked on Google; but the fact the stories are gleaned from virtually opposite ends of the country suggests that this is an issue whose day has come.  Certainly, the amount of controversy and traffic engendered by the diary below rivals that of our hottest gun discussions.  That some of the animus was personality-driven nevertheless leaves considerable actual debate on the table with regard to the substantial issues.

India was mentioned in one of the threads, reminding me once again, that when I visited that country in 1983, begging and homelessness was still uncommon in most of the U.S.   So uncommon, in fact, that  I was quite unprepared for the shock of seeing so many people living such marginal lives in close proximity with the homes of bankers, stock-brokers and wealthy business owners.  I think at that time, India had one of the highest levels of income inequity in the developed world.  Today, the U.S. occupies a similar position, with India having improved to be closer to the European norm.

So, unless something can be done to stem the tide of income inequity (which seems unlikely given today’s political realities) we can only hope to have as peaceful a coexistence of parallel but contrasting lives as India had in 1983!

It is however, a faint hope at best.  Despite its diversity of traditional cultures, India’s population was pretty homogenous in its practical belief systems.  If you were poor, centuries of tradition had taught your people that this was never going to change for them; and a convenient religious conceit provided that you must accept that lot in life if you were ever to hope for a better hereafter.

As visitors, we were struck by the fact that despite the horrifying crimes of violence that seemed to be routinely taking place among the rural poor; and despite what we in the U.S. would have seen as conditions strongly favoring revolution in the cities; the wealthiest citizens walked amongst the throngs of wraithlike poor, more or less unmolested…except for what can only be described as the most aggressive pan-handling.

How will the U.S. fair in its own decent into two-tiered living, when our popular mythology has relentlessly insisted that anyone can be rich, anyone can be famous, anyone can be president?  I wonder.

It’s been almost a century since America’s financial elite recognized the smell of revolution in the aftermath of WWI.  Tent cities constructed by homeless Veterans served to put the robber barons on notice that, if somebody didn’t come up with a way to remedy some of the inequities, the wolves that would be at their own doors would be their own fellow citizens, and they would come trained as merciless killers, just as had happened in Russia not long before.

It was not some noble inclination that finally prompted the power elite to create what the Republican’s like to think of as the “Welfare State;” it was this fear that violent revolution might be just around the corner.

But Republicans, particularly “Tea Party” Republicans, have just as short a memory as they have an attention span for the troubles of the 99%.

I realize this was sort of a long story with a short purpose of redirecting the conversation back to what place we will find for the destitute in our unequal society, when they begin to quote the language of the Bill of Rights?

VPT had a very interesting Bill Moyers segment on today, in which he spoke with Richard Slotkin, author of “Violence,” “The Fatal Environment” and “Gunfighter Nation” about the mythology and history of violence in this country.

I end with a link to that program because, although it focusses on school shootings,  it certainly is worth considering in this conversation, too.