Monday, August 15, 2016
Two Rich Kids Flee Chicago
Chicago is a tough place. One learns not to engage over-zealous beggars who are playing SET YOU UP games. The line between beggar and robber can be distinctly thin in places like Chicago. Sending these two innocent young prep school lambs into Chicago was a near tragedy, what were their insane yuppie parents thinking? They are not homeless with Mummy's 200,000 dollar kitchen behind then but merely young people who boomer-ranged.
The ironic thing is I met probably 20-30 of the same guy who caused them to call up their rich parents to rescue them. What kind of business was this guy going to start? They didn't live too far from the neighborhood I spent 5 years in. One thing, the economic divide is so vastly wide in America, the other side really does not know how the other half lives, and with young people this may have dangerous consequences. When I moved to Chicago, I already had lived in rough neighborhoods and worked with incarcerated youth. It was rougher then I expected but no Calvary came to rescue me!
These rich kids might be doing some social psychology or sociology experiment in the streets and then realized it is a dangerous business. They have a privilege of calling their parents to rescue them. Many hurting homeless people hate it when rich college students slum it in their streets or homeless shelter in order to see what it is like to be homeless and then leave quickly after they deal with reality. I've seen those types when I lived in a shelter. One young woman who stayed in the shelter told me she was a Psychology graduate student from a university in Chicago, and that employees in the shelter gave her permission to stay in the shelter to study us. It was in 2007. We were in the Northeast coast United States. These rich kids probably read my shelter roommate's research journal and chose to study homelessness today.
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