Musings on SR 99 and poverty

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, the condo that my wife and I bought is located just off of State Route 99 about 10 miles north of Seattle. Not to put too fine a point on it, but SR99 could best be described as strip-mall hell.

In any event, what has been sort of bubbling around in my mind of late is how many of the businesses along this highway are dedicated to exploiting poor people and keeping them poor. Check cashing and payday advance places, pawnshops, rent a center places, auto dealers with e-z credit and ruinous interest. The list is literally as endless as the cheap and sleazy establishments that stretch to the horizon.

I don’t really know where this is heading, just that driving through this every day to and from work I get the deep sense that we are somehow lost as a people. It is as if we somehow want people to be poor, and do just about everything that we can to make sure that we have a good supply of the dispossessed.

I really don’t know why we are like this. It seems that we are smart enough and prosperous enough to eliminate want, but for some obscene reason choose not to do so. I swear, some days I feel as if there has been a shipping error and I was actually meant to go to a more reasonable and sane planet.

2

With a fixed amount of resources available to all the people of the world, I wonder how much of that resource base is tied up by people claiming it as their own, earned, of course, through dint of effort, and refusing to allow free access and use by others. When we think of exploitation, we generally relate it to making it easy to get people to use their minimal resources to claim a small part of the total resource base, at a loss to the buyer and a gain to the seller. But, really, it’s those people who tie up huge resources for their own private use that make the rich richer and the poor destitute.