When I was a kid, we’d go “downtown” (to the extent that there was a downtown here; Manhattan, we’re not) quite a bit . Back then our downtown thrived – this was before suburban shopping malls, and if you wanted to go shopping, you hopped a downtown bus. The sidewalks and stores were filled with people, and it was fun – riding the bus, seeing lots of people, and maybe getting a milk shake at the soda shop. Now, sadly, there’s not much of anything down there besides half-full (who says I’m not an optimist) office buildings, buses filled with bored-looking people passing through on their way to somewhere else, a few panhandlers, some homeless people (if you know where to look; they like to keep them out of sight), and urban tumbleweeds (aka, garbage) blowing down the lonely, empty streets.

A few times a year, we’d go down to see the Shriner’s circus or the Ice Follies (I remember seeing Peggy Fleming when I was eight or nine or something, right after she won a gold medal in the Olympics; I remember her looking absolutely beautiful) or whatever, and when my brother wasn’t busy defending democracy in Southeast Asia, he’d take me to see our semi-pro hockey team, the Blazers. These events were held at the War Memorial Auditorium, where a once proud original NBA team played and won an NBA championship, before moving on to Philadelphia. If you’ve seen the movie “Slapshot” with Paul Newman, then you’ve seen our War Memorial, ‘cuz that’s where a lot of the hockey scenes were shot.

On almost every corner, you’d see people around on the streets selling balloons (the balloons inside of balloons always intrigued me) or monkeys on sticks, or some other useless crap that kids just had to have only to pop, break, or abandon within 24 hours, plus popcorn, newspapers – your basic street vendor shit. These street vendors were typically – and forgive me if this is insensitive; I mean no disrespect – dwarfs or amputees, or otherwise handicapped physically or mentally (I remember one little person who had no legs, and got around on what looked like the side of a wooden crate with roller skate wheels attached to it. He wore fingerless leather gloves, and pushed himself around a lot faster than I’ll ever move). This is where the people who fell through the cracks landed, and that’s how they made whatever meager living they could eke out.

I don’t know if those folks are still around or not (don’t get downtown much these days; the lunchtime hot dog vendor business is pretty hot, I guess, for the folks who work down there, but by five o’clock everything’s deserted except for shadowy figures in hooded sweatshirts lurking around unlit, abandoned storefronts), but if they are, I’m sure times are tougher than ever for them. I don’t think the market for worthless crap is what it used to be – unless it’s painted white, beeps, and is called iCrap or something.

It would be nice if we lived in a society where those who fall through the cracks get some help (oh, I know, there are a lot of folks – public and private – out there trying, but the cracks are getting wider, and the help is getting harder to proivide). Health care (mental and physical) for everybody would be a good start. But, that’s been effectively quashed. Clinton couldn’t do it back in ’93 or whenever that was, and Obama isn’t able (or willing) to do it now. The insurance industry and our “representatives” in government have seen to that (with a lot of help from their brainless zombie army and their friends in the media; the story isn’t about whether public health care is good or bad – or what could make it better or worse – it’s that a bunch of ignorant buffoons are screaming out their gibberish, acting like petulant little children). The congress critters that aren’t on the insurance industry’s payroll are too spineless (with a couple of notable exceptions, of course) to stand up and do what’s right. They compromised their way out of true reform even before the process started.

Oh, something will pass. The insurance industry will make out great, and maybe that’ll lift the stock market. That won’t do much for the folks out there on the streets trying to make enough money to survive, of course. And when they get sick and die, well, maybe they’ll get a mention in the paper (but who reads papers these days?), maybe not. Many of them will wind up hanging in the anatomy cooler, unwittingly donating their bodies to science by virtue of the fact that they died unnoticed and unclaimed (bet you didn’t know that’s where most of the med school cadavers come from, did ya).

Granny will keep trying to find a few blankets to discharge indigent folks from the hospital with more than hospital gowns next winter. Others will go home (or back to the shelter) without their meds because they lack the medicare/medicaid required co-pay. And every day, another one or two of us “regular” people will join them out on the streets, for the crime of being uninsured (or claims denied and upaid; thank goodness health care isn’t rationed) and sick. Lose your health, your job, your house, your dignity, your life; it’s all OK, as long as insurance companies make a profit.

Hopefully it won’t be me. My life is pretty darn good, and that seems to be the yardstick by which my father-in-law measures things. Times are good for me, I’ve got plenty, so everybody else must, too. If not, they just aren’t working hard enough – after all, I made it through the war, and we came to this country with nothing – and we did it legally, too, goddamn it, not like these illegals that are everywhere, sucking up welfare and taking all the good jobs cleaning motel rooms and picking lettuce.

So, I got mine, and the hell with the rest of you. As long as it stays that way, and I don’t get laid off or sick or hit by a bus full of bored people passing through on their way to somewhere else.

Might wanna to stock up on balloons and monkeys on sticks, though, just in case.