Many people
question just how bad social conditions can get if the economy deteriorates
further. After all, they say, we live in a civilized society with a safety
net that can help those who find themselves in dire straits.
Unfortunately,
such views don't necessarily square with reality. Even now, in the midst of a
so-called recovery, some urban down-and-outers have decided that a more
primitive approach to survival is called for, as the New York Post reports in "'Game' Time in B'klyn":
It's a little
slice of Alabama in the middle of Brooklyn.
A pack of
vagrants was found living in a makeshift camp alongside the Prospect Park
lake, where they poached the local wildlife using cruel hunting methods,
officials said yesterday.
The dirty-dozen
men and women have spent the last two months on the lake's southern shore
near a construction site for a $70 million ice-skating complex.
They have
littered the area with beer cans, poaching nets and other trash, with much of
the refuse winding up in the lake.
"It's
disgusting," said wildlife advocate Johanna Clearfield. "The city
doesn't care, because it's the poor side of the park. This wouldn't happen on
the Park Slope side or by Grand Army Plaza.
"The most
they've done is issue fines to homeless people who can't pay."
The drifters
have been illegally trapping and cooking up the critters that call the park
home, including squirrels, ducks and swan-like cygnets.
They used crude
tactics to hunt their prey, including barbed fishing hooks that ripped off
the top half of one poor gosling's beak. They then cooked the meat over
illegal fires. Some of the animals were eaten raw.
Of course, this
doesn't necessarily mean the streets of New York (and other cities) will be
overrun with aggressive hunter-gathers as the economy cycles down. In fact,
many of those who see or are worried about hard times ahead have decided to
act now. They are stockpiling necessities before the stuff really hits
the fan. Unfortunately, as the latest Dilbert
cartoon suggests (in Scott Adams' humorous but
characteristically spot-on way), that may not be the perfect solution either.
Michael J. Panzner
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