buzz kill

When I was walking through one of the public housing developments the other day, I picked up this.



It's just a busted up video game controller, yea, but it also struck me as a cool symbol for the weird kind of poverty we're dealing with down here. The neighborhoods in which we work are some of the poorest in the country, and a lot of the living conditions are pretty gross. But it doesn't look like the poverty you see on TV.

(Thanks, Josh, for the photos that I took without asking!)

Can you imagine a sappy infomercial asking for money to feed the person who lives in the photo above? Or to fund his kids' education? No way. What's depressing about this job is that sometimes I get the overwhelming sense that some of these kids just don't have a chance. That doesn't mean they're not saturated in consumer culture, though, so they still want all kinds of goofy things. I mean, of course they do. They're kids, and that's allowed. One kid waiting for his friends to finish the survey the other day drew me this.


I won't pretend to be some kind of expert on poverty; just thought I'd say something about how this stuff is a little (a lot) fucked up.