This winter may have been mild, but it is Scotland, and it is winter, cold and damp, not the sort of conditions anyone should find themselves homeless. While our parasitical politicians tell how well everything is doing, spouting, everything is on the up and up, some facts contradict that propaganda. The number of homeless people is rising, rising homelessness can never equate with an improving society. Glasgow City Mission, a charity that helps provide temporary shelter for homeless people, claims to have had a 60%+ increase in the number of rough-sleepers seeking a bed for the night. The charity claimed that, December 2015, saw 711 individuals came to them seeking a bed, compared with 437 December 2014. The quietest night this December saw 14 individuals seek a bed for the night, last December that figure was 4. While the busiest December night this year the figure was 31, compared with last December when there were 21.
Not a very flattering picture of Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, and an indictment of the system we live under. Glasgow has an abundance of glossy, glitzy, shopping malls, lots of fancy expensive restaurants, car parks littered with luxury cars, yet hunger and homelessness stalks its streets. Under the neon lights a doorway can be a shelter from the cold and damp, a dark lane, a bed for the night. There is an invisible army of enforced hungry, lurking in the shadows of abundance. It is totally unacceptable that hunger's vicious claws tear at an individual a hands throw away from a warehouse of food. It is totally unacceptable that someone should lay their head on cold wet stone for a bed, when the city abounds in empty accommodation.
This cruel injustice is the law of capitalism, no matter your needs, you will have to do without, if you can't pay. You can't be provided for if there is no profit in it for somebody. In this insane system, you can die from hypothermia and/or hunger, while shelter lies empty, and food rots next door. Why do we tolerate this?
The Homeless
Tenebrous spectres, they exist, out there,
on the crumbling edge of chaos.
A father, a son, a brother,
a daughter, a sister, a mother.
Fragments of some shattered family structure;
waste products
from a society being driven to destruction
by a hurricane of greed,
living a life that wears out life,
dying,
the devious death of exhaustion from existence.
