Bad Well Water

This notion, the one I borrowed, then shaped myself, originated when an older homeless man riding a bicycle with one hand and carrying a large garbage bag of cans in the other, nearly ran me over as I walked down a sidewalk and sent my takeout cheese pizza flying.

He swerved to avoid me, stopped, apologized, and we struck up a conversation.

I asked him:

How was the canning? Excellent. I'm on my way to cash them in.

Where do you live? Out there.

Are you looking to find housing? The government fucked me over.

Were you incarcerated or something? They made me drink bad well water.

You mean real water? Yes.

The man launched into a rational rant about bad well water. I stayed with him as long as I could and recalled the expression of “poisoning the well,” that sometimes a character referenced in a B Western with six shooters or Hollywood desert epic with camels.

He concluded his rant and said he had to go. I did, too. My pizza was getting cold. He rode away with gusto and nearly plowed over another pedestrian.

On my walk home, I decided to dive into his bad well water notion and swim around in it.

Bad water warped and killed people in Flint, Michigan. It does the same on many Indian reservations. Bad water might have hastened the end of the Roman Empire via lead poising that caused gradual insanity.

What's the bad well water in America life that brought on the current homeless crisis?

How about three decades of:

processed foods and refined sugar?

meth, opioids and fentanyl?

the internet?

a massive malaise brought on by the disease of high tech?

Christianity utterly devoid of the teachings of Jesus?

mass incarceration and mass probation? mass narcissism that undermined personal responsibility and community spirit?

a failure of faith-based organizations to address the issue and make it the top priority of service?

the hangover of Ronald Reagan's economic policies, which included the Great Recession 0f 2008-09 and five million people losing their homes?

how about two terms under Democratic presidents that exacerbated income inequality?

bad reporting or no reporting on the crisis? (I can think of a few exceptions but the Great Recessions story was almost criminally overlooked.)

restrictive land use policies that favored single family dwelling units in urban, suburban and rural areas?

Americans just flat out quitting (but why now? The Americans of the Great Depression didn't quit.)

What about all of these in unprecedented combination, a true toxic cesspool sucked through straws by people already on the margins or who were perfectly all right?

Wrestle with that bad well water notion. How do we go about finding fresh water?