However, as I rode my bicycle down Thurman Way in South Sacramento to my cousin's house, I got to see where most of my tax dollars are going instead. Instead of NASA, my labors are used to support the chronic bums of South Sacramento. There are thousands upon thousands. They are everywhere. And nowhere.
I must say that Sacramento is, for the most part, a complete shithole. I get the privilege of riding my bicycle from a "decent" suburban environment to work everyday through former decent suburban environments, those that have already turned to liquid shit, while it's only a matter of time until my little "neighborhood" does the same. This is the untold reality of suburbia -- the older, earlier rings around the central city core always erode, as those with means escape to the next tier, to the next ring, and the blight repeats, with newer construction ever farther out, enticing those with means to move there, creating suburban wastelands in-between the city with the jobs and the hinterlands with the housal units. South Sacramento falls into the earlier "ring category," hence its fate is to become and stay a shithole. It just happened to do so first. North Elk Grove will become second, while those with the money and the means will simply pick up and move to the next tier, abandoning their earlier "community" while believing they are establishing a new, better "community" even more removed from everything.
And when this happens, my Elk Grove will become home to tens of thousands of chronic bums much like South Sacramento, where rents will become cheap, roads will be just good enough to drive to the consumption depots, to the EDD offices, to the county medical centers. And the bums will be enabled by programs to help them, to help them stay bums.
I say all this from personal, one-on-one observations with a dozen South Sacramentans living on Thurman Way -- my cousin among them. He is fully capable of working yet somehow can't find employment, somehow gets fired/released/let go/terminated/laid off from every job he's ever had. He's got his EBT card yet there isn't a day that goes by where he doesn't knock back a half dozen 211's or Earthquakes. He is among an entire neighborhood of others just like him, an entire neighborhood. You can be assured that this is repeated four thousand times here in Sacramento and four million times across this great land of ours.
Aside from EBT services, he's received free care for having plowed his face into the asphalt while drunk on a bicycle:
free care for his staph infection living amongst the flies and filth, free hospitalization from chronic alcohol abuse...on and on. This is where my tax dollars go, not to NASA, and he'll continue this gravy train for as long as he can, because he can. During his few lucid moments he admits this. There is no reason to try looking for a job, he admits.
There is no reason for the wife of my co-worker to look for a job either, who has no intention of returning to the workforce following a recent childbirth, but who has been receiving unemployment for the past nineteen months. And why wouldn't she? It's free money. Fuck yea, I'd do the same thing. Drive it until the wheels fall off. 99 months, 199 months, 1999 months...when will it end?
Well, it may never end, because in my mind we've created an economy based on services, where only a small percentage of us hold real employment while a larger percentage of us shuffle in and out of these service-based jobs, taking unemployment in between.
There is no reason to believe we will change this, because there is nothing to make me think that we will manufacture anything again. In my mind, manufacturing is key. Without this, we become a nation of lawyers, financiers, bankers, real estate agents, insurance saleswomen, musical theater performers, Target clerks, Asian foot masage "therapists," casino cleaners, Red Lobster waiters and garbage collectors -- jobs in the tertiary sector...requiring the efforts of other nation's manufacturing and production. We have fewer and fewer jobs in energy production, mining, and manufacturing, and as such, I see us becoming a nation of a handful of billionaires and a half billion lower class service providers.
This might be OK if we created better-wage service jobs compared to our manufacturing bretheren -- but we haven't. On the whole, we are trading our manufacturing and production jobs for lower valued service jobs.
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