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Going For The Gold

I had to go to India to get my gold. By “my gold” I mean only a few pieces of jewelry — about as much as I might wear to a big party. I had bought it for a song in Arabia twenty-five years ago. Was it worth the price of a trip to India? I had no idea.

Begging

A drug addict, a second-grader, a domestic violence victim

Sunbeams

Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places . . . live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Get A Job

Why Welfare Reform Is An Attack On All Women

What is being proposed under the title “welfare reform” is cuts in programs for the poorest and most vulnerable members of American society: nutritional programs and Medicaid programs and housing programs and programs for the aged, impoverished, and disabled. But the program that is most targeted for reform is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program for poor mothers and their children. Men can get benefits, too, but the overwhelming majority of parents on AFDC are women, about five million of them, with about nine million children.

Silas

Silas works at a social-service agency. He sits inside a cubicle, behind a metal desk with a simulated-wood surface. One by one, people — mostly old women, but some old men, too — come and sit on a metal folding chair across the desk from Silas, where they weep and whine and struggle to maintain their dignity and finally grow vexed and demand their Social Security checks.

Fist Stick Knife Gun

If you wonder how a fourteen-year-old can shoot another child in the head, or how boys can commit a drive-by shooting and then go home to dinner, you need to realize that one doesn’t get to that point in a day, or a week, or a month.

At The Altar Of Progress

It is characteristic of industrialism to make swift and thorough use of nature’s stored-up treasures and living organisms (called “resources”) without regard to the stability or sustainability of the world that provides them.

Me And Miss Messiah

Moving Out

Pencils, three hundred dollars, slashed tires

Sunbeams

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

Tennessee Williams