Photo from numeroteca.org
Note: this piece steals many ideas from Adam Carolla.
I saw the first one right after Easter, on a garbage truck. “SCAVENGING IS ILLEGAL.” A picture of some poor fucker bent over a trash can trying to scrounge up a couple bucks worth of bottles and cans for a beer. They’ve finally done it. They have made a sign that would literally make Jesus Christ puke. Even the little crossed out baby sign on the dumpsters isn’t as bad. That one is trying to help people. You don’t have to throw out your baby, just take it to the firehouse. Also, what part of “Yard Waste Only” don’t you understand. But this one might as well be a huge middle finger flipping off a hobo and read “FUCK THE POOR.”
They’re campaigning against people who have to live off trashpicking. Stop collecting cans, you miscreants. Get a real job. You could be the CEO of Apple if you applied yourself. Why? Of all the things on Earth, this hurts no one, and it doesn’t seem like there’s even any money in it. You chop your arm off and call 911 in L.A., it’ll take 45 minutes for them to show up. They will ask you if any city property was damaged. But if your car is on the wrong side of the street at 8:00:01 on Thursday, or at 9:15 after the street sweeper has gone by, a fleet of their Dodge Neons will materialize like Romulan War Birds uncloaking to give you a HUGE ticket. That makes sense, in a twisted way. The city needs dough.
But the homeless poor have nothing left to steal. That’s why there’s Skid Row, where junkies live in tents and shit on the street– it costs money to hassle them, arrest them, keep them in jail. Give them methadone and cut off their skin tumors on the county’s dime so you don’t get sued. Jailing a homeless person is like adopting a sick dog and the city doesn’t want hair on their pillows. Just let ’em die on the sidewalk. Corpse disposal is relatively cheap. So why go after them?
“The City of LA recycling program relies on the items in those bins to pay for the cost of the program. Scavengers are stealing from the city, and ultimately costing taxpayers and the City much needed money and resources.”
Ohhhhhh. They want the bottle deposits for themselves. “Scavengers are stealing from the city”
Scavengers are stealing from the city. Surely you don’t mean the deposit that I paid on the bottles and cans, right? That’s the city’s money I pre-paid out of pocket? Does this mean if I take the cans to the recycling center myself and sell them back, I’m stealing from the city? Does this mean that once we jail the poor for taking trash the city can stop writing bullshit traffic tickets, bullshit fix-it tickets, bullshit parking tickets, bullshit DUI’s; stop imposing bullshit garbage taxes that don’t pay for garbage pickup but to put “a thousand more cops on the streets” to write bullshit tickets and do absolutely nothing to stop fucking crime?
They want you to pay a tax to buy a can and then they want to collect the tax again, for themselves, for the trash pickup budget. “That recycling money keeps our trash rates down.” No, it doesn’t, our trash rates are through the roof because our game show host mayor needed to give a multimillion dollar handjob to the cops. Sorry, garbagemen– you should have fought harder for a piece.
We want money and we want it so bad that we will persecute people who have NOTHING. And if scaring you that they’re gonna jack up trash rates isn’t enough– those hobos creeping by the dumpster are CASING YOUR HOUSE. They see when you’re not home. How’d you like to get home one day and find the guy who shoveled coal in Waterworld wearing the skin of your pets and children? And they could STEAL your IDENTITY!
Anyone with his shit together enough to break into a house and/or steal an identity doesn’t need the eight cents from my store brand can of kidney beans. Can collectors haven’t sat down at a computer since the library figured out how to block porn. But they can see when you’re not home— yeah, me too. Between 9 and 5, Monday through Friday. That’s when people aren’t home. And maybe 8-12 on Sunday when some folks are in church listening to the words of Jesus Christ before they head home and encourage the cops to imprison the fucking poor for taking trash.
How much money do you fucking need? The answer is always: all of it. As much as we can fuck people out of before they grab pitchforks. We want more but trash rates are too high already– hey, I have an idea. Everyone hates homeless people. Let’s fuck them out of their can money. Then let’s stomp on a nest of baby birds and bring Jesus back so we can shit on his face. I hear there’s a buck in it.
delicioustacos 
related: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
I’m not 100% sure how the hipster-on-food-stamp debate correlates to dt’s piece. Yours is about how the internet highlights a sociological underpinning that causes us to resent the marginal success of those seemingly less deserving than ourselves – the crab pot mentality. Dt’s piece outlines the blatant hypocrisy of LABOS and the rest of the City of LA, full of irony that the nation’s capital of homelessness is now launched a truck-mounted advertising campaign to haggle the poor over pennies. All the while, trash rates are going up across our fair county, the City would rather fight the defenseless and prosecute the voiceless. Your article is about how salon.com decided to give more of a voice to their target demographic, only less well-heeled. Either I failed to see the relevance in reading both articles or you did in linking to yours.
After I pressed “post comment” I realized I was unable to edit it to “semi-related”.
Then I went to the bathroom and made my morning poo.
Life goes on.
This link was a great read.
If I could hear sermons half this poignant at church I’d go every Sunday.
In that spirit, testify, brother! Make it plain!
I’m reading To Have Or To Be and so far it’s pretty much this whole post, but not angry.
The wanting to have everything and not wanting to have things taken away from them part, not the hating the homeless people part. So I guess it’s not the whole post.
Wanting:
adj 1: not existing; “innovation has been sadly lacking”;
“character development is missing from the book” [syn:
lacking(p), missing, nonexistent, wanting(a)]
2: inadequate in amount or degree; “a deficient education”;
“deficient in common sense”; “lacking in stamina”; “tested
and found wanting” [syn: deficient, lacking(p), wanting(p)]
thanks?
Ain’t no such thing as a state run methadone clinic. They don’t even take private insurance, you gotta pay for that shit out of pocket. $75 a week for the one I was on. I *think* if you’re on medicaid you get a discount, like you might pay $25 a week instead of full price. Methadone clinics make money hand over fist, that shit is so cheap to make, it probably cost like five bucks to make a 55 gallon drum full of methadone. And the individual doses are around .05 ounces.
Discomforting yet it bites… Yes reality bites..
Emma – http://www.dumaguetenyo.com