A Heart Grown Cold - 2

Silver & Gold Won't Bring Back a Heart Grown Cold

In the first post of this series we included an actual photo, taken in a city in the U.S., showing that some of us no longer have that "old time" empathy, compassion, or care for the welfare of others in our midst (The Common Good).

In this photo (left), an American drowned in his sleep after rolling over into water in an abandoned building, then froze in death as the water he had fallen into became solid ice.

There will be more of that as our nation goes through the throes of freezing to death, while becoming something other than what our nation once was when it was known as a light on a hill.

Those charged with caring for the people like the deceased person in the photo, those in Washington, D.C., have cut off unemployment insurance and food stamps to millions of people like the American in the photo:

This city has not always been a gentle place, but a series of events over the past few, frigid days causes one to wonder how cold the collective heart has grown.

It starts with a phone call made by a man who said his friend found a dead body in the elevator shaft of an abandoned building on the city's west side.

"He's encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks," the caller phoned to tell this reporter.
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Before calling the police, this reporter went to check on the tip, skeptical of a hoax. Sure enough, in the well of the cargo elevator, two feet jutted out above the ice. Closer inspection revealed that the rest of the body was encased in 2-3 feet of ice, the body prostrate, suspended into the ice ...
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The building is known as the Roosevelt Warehouse, once belonging to the Detroit Public Schools as a book repository. Located near 14th Street and Michigan Avenue, the warehouse burned in 1987 and caused something of a scandal as thousands of books, scissors, footballs and crayons were left to rot while Detroit schoolchildren -- some of the poorest children in the country -- went without supplies.
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A colony of homeless men live in the warehouse. Wednesday morning a few fires were burning inside oil drums. Scott Ruben, 38, huddled under filthy blankets not 20 paces from the elevator shaft.
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There are at least 19,000 homeless people in Detroit, by some estimates. Put another way, more than 1 in 50 people here are homeless.

The human problem is so bad, and the beds so few, that some shelters in the city provide only a chair. The chair is yours as long as you sit in it. Once you leave, the chair is reassigned.

Thousands of down-on-their-luck adults do nothing more with their day than clutch onto a chair. This passes for normal in some quarters of the city.

(Frozen in Indifference, emphasis added). The corporations down the street which make the vehicles that poison the atmosphere were bailed out when they got themselves into trouble, as were the banks who were and are still plundering us.

The poor and homeless will not be bailed out (Epigovernment: The New Model - 8).

America is an empire that is metaphorically freezing to death (Phases Of An Empire Freezing To Death) as well as being in the process of metaphorically taking off all clothing ("paradoxical undressing").

Just as individuals who freeze to death while awake do (Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death) to later appear naked and stone-cold to a perplexed world (Is The Empress Taking Off Her Clothes?).

The frozen state of "the mind" in "the union" (The State of The Onion Script, True State of the Union) will not tell us we are sinking into the mentality and culture of feudalism (American Feudalism - 6).

The previous post in this series is here.

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America, by Simon & Garfunkel

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