I walk past the Vern, and the alleyway door is conspicuously covered in human feces. Dysentery is on the rise, not because people don't wash their ass so much as because they are prevented from doing so, for want of shelter, for want of the means of hygiene that the mechanisms of profit and privation deny them. People make Oregon Trail jokes and I wonder, is this a joke to you? I walk by corpses in the cold because I have to get to work. I have to get to work or else the cops will force me into the cold, too. What does it mean to be a progressive when financial diktat demands you administer budget cuts? How can a progressive council assert the values we elected them on — ex: practical opposition to starvation, unpayable rents, unlivable wages, and plagues on plagues on plagues — when the buck always stops with, "We just don't have the money." What does it mean to believe in anything when literal corporate vampires can simply force your hand? We have the resources to address these things. Seize the housing necessary. Train massive labor forces to do the work of living compassion. Build a loving society, the bottom line be damned. Or will the death cult of capital cow you, too? Let the rich flee, let their money run. Will you rise to the reality that we do not need them?