I Have A Statement To Make Too

I did not understand poverty when I was kid. I had very little pocket money, my allowance being a dime, later raised to two bits once I could safely handle the family chainsaw. Safely being defined as refraining from causing myself or anyone else to bleed so profusely that a trip in the family ambulance, our beastly station wagon, was necessary.

Our family never missed a meal however. The definition of just what a meal was in Newfinese helped make that possible. We ate shit the fucking Chinese would not touch with a ten foot chopstick.

There were poor kids in our neighbourhood however. We just did not think it was possible to be more poor than we were. The poor kids lived in the apartments, apartments that would become familiar to everyone around Dope City once some asshole tv producer figured out sending camera crews and a reporter with the police every weekend would result in enough sensational footage to give us our own local weekly Fear In The Streets show.

The kids from those apartments were pretty much the same as everybody else except they wore the shitty everybody gets the same ones no exceptions glasses that the fucking government would agree to pay for only because it would cost them more for the funerals of the little fuckers if they kept walking blindly into traffic like they did in the days before Fare Thee Well.

Later, when I would visit those same apartments to feed my various insatiable drug habits, and later still, when I moved into a few of those punk rock apartments, I got to see what the fuck was really going on in the lives of kids like the poor fuckers I had gone to school with.

Poverty is unhealthy for everybody. You know the fucking details. No one can hide from its effects. Lots of motherfuckers pretend they can.

Maybe you have heard about the growing gap between the fucking rich and the fucking poor. My province's capitalists, responding to news that the income gap between our high faluting neighbourhoods and our poorest was most pronounced here on Canada's west coast, came out with a statement defending the status quo. They said it was regrettable but capitalism is better than any other competing system that might replace it.

I have a statement to make too.

Fuck them and the Rolls Royce they rode in on.