 Originally Posted by Original Poster
This particular tactic resembled too closely the Holocaust. But many other similar and insidious tactics are used to repel the homeless. If they could afford lawyers, most cities in the US would be facing some serious charges. Most places just run your name, go through your shit, cut your backpack straps, beat you and taser you and call it a day. In some places, they load the homeless onto a van and drop them off in a nearby, scummier city with no questions asked. In other places, they require you to go to homeless rehab where you're required to go to therapy on why you cannot hold onto a shelter. Many places across the US have outlawed not only asking for help, but also giving help. (Prohibiting churches and missions to hand out food or provide shelter). In one particular city it's illegal to be there without at least 50 bucks in your pocket.
You've also got people mimicking the brown and black shirts of fascist revolts by roaming around beating and killing the homeless, often without repercussion. They're being treated in a very similar way that gipsies and homeless were treated by the Nazis, and for the most part people don't notice.
I've noticed a bit of a "radical activity" (for lack of a better term) in my city recently. There's a bit of political tagging/graffiti going on (one referenced the Autobiography of Malcolm X, someone's going around writing "The revolution will not be televised..." - a phrase popularized by the Gil Scott Heron song, etc) and someone's going around leaving notes with politically charged slogans and suggestions (eg. "Kill the poor, save the economy," "Save the poor, abolish welfare," etc).
The person dropping the notes gets points for ingenuity (a revolutionary litterer ), but his/her ideas seem... half-cooked. The litter doesn't get picked up, it either stays there or gets blown over to a new spot by the wind. It's a rather simple and inexpensive way to put certain thoughts in people's heads, and has the potential to be made extremely effective. These things have been dropped on walkways/trails, stuck between fence posts, left at bus stops, left on buses, etc. It's being done rather haphazardly (it'd be more sensible to follow a well-thought-out pattern) but the fact that it's being done at all caught me totally off guard. I'll try to get a few pictures if I can find some more of these things when i go out tomorrow.
There's been quite a bit of uproar within the community after a rise in sexual assaults, gang activity, violent assaults, robberies, murders (the murder-rate broke a new record in 2013), etc. The city's population continues to grow faster than the city can keep up, and the city council seems to be focused more on taking on new projects than cleaning up old issues. A mother was recently beaten to death (the official story left out details, but word is she was either beaten with a brick or possibly even stoned) while waiting to pick up her son from hockey practice; the incident's managed to galvanize the community in a way that I've never seen before in the two decades I've lived here. My guess (and it's just a guess), is that we're going to see people steadily growing angrier with the system as the days go by - especially since it's an election year.
I personally believe we're going through a repeat of the late 1950's and are transitioning to another cultural upheaval similar to that if the radical 1960's. And considering the resources that are available to us, I think this one's going to hit much harder. Not just in this city, but North America in general - radicalism is definitely on the rise. Either these revolutionary* sentiments will gain enough momentum to become an ideological movement, or the potential uplift will be snuffed out by extreme apathy.
I find this sort of thing fascinating to observe, and I recommend everyone else to start paying attention to this as well. The Occupy Protests, the evolution of Anonymous, the radical-led gov't shutdown in the US, etc - this might just be the beginning of a whole new chapter for North America.
* By revolution, I don't mean armed militancy (though there's definitely potential for that in certain parts of America), but a radical shift in perspectives and socio-political ideologies. In the midst of crises, extreme apathy in any given majority always sparks extreme activity amongst a minority.
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Off-topic: I think I witnessed a cop making a drug deal earlier tonight. A squad car pulled up on our street (almost always empty), a pickup drove up beside it, and the driver passed something to the cop. The cop simply drove off without giving it back, so it couldn't have been ID. Of course it might not have been anything at all, the guy in the pick could have just been asking for directions and then simply shook the cop's hand afterwards. I'm inclined to believe it was just my imagination since that's the type of thing you only see in movies (and America... ), but idk. I was going to call it in but it sounds too far-fetched even for me, and I sure as hell don't want to falsely accuse anyone of anything (sure as fuck not a cop).
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