Editor’s note: The People’s Tribune received this statement through our website.
LAS VEGAS, NV — The medical community and hospital security had me hauled away to jail for being in the waiting room at Desert Springs Hospital just nine days into post surgery . . . while I was SLEEPING for Christ’s sake. No place is safe to sleep in Vegas. If you’re not gambling, you have no business being here . . . I’ve been thrown outa casinos, off buses, slot parlors, Walmart, Laundromats, Smiths —but HAULED TO JAIL for sleeping in a hospital waiting room? I’ve never heard of such a thing. I was all alone at 4:30 a.m., nine days after being cut, gutted and stitched. I was manhandled out of the ER and thrown into the backseat cage like I was a ragdoll.
There’s a lot I can handle . . . I have done so for longer than I care to remember out here in the Urban Wild, but all this AND Trump on top of homelessness? It’s just way too much. I ask every day how much longer can this total displacement and tortuous nothingness of concrete, neon and desert dirt hold me in its bond? With little more than Social Security retirement, is this small gutter gig to be my final resting place?
Living on my retirement and $15/month food stamps is a high wire dance I somehow managed, but the clatter wheels of paying Medicare doctors and technicians, with their insistent and petty co-payments, (ridiculous) while chasing the medical protocol for referrals, specialists and jumping through their senseless Medicare hoops and hospital policies . . . I’ve survived! But I can no longer justify it anymore, not living like a bug or a half-human being on these streets of Las Vegas every day without contributing something.
Thanks for reading . . . I’m hoping to get some help out of this excruciating, bad situation and its dulling depression. I’ve been embedded in the homeless condition of inhumanity in America.
Good luck and God bless you. I get sixteen dollars in food stamps and will not be able to send ten dollars a month for People’s Tribune and ten dollars every other month for Tribuno del Pueblo because I just withdrew my last unemployment payment from bank because now there are no unemployment payment checks, there are mandatory bank cards which tellers, cashiers are nice by the way. So now only my $495 monthly social security payment for retirement, plus food stamps, at least. I believe people will take to the streets because when food stamps get cut by $190 billion, and families don’t have food for their children, they, we and our sons and daughters, and grandkids will take to the streets as the saying goes when we march.