Two whole hours? 120 MINUTES?
The city of Cupertino, California, will host a “Poverty Simulation” with two organizations designed to help the residents of Silicon Valley understand the poverty that surrounds the wealthy community.
The City of Cupertino and West Valley Community Services will sponsor the TWO-HOUR Poverty Simulation on Nov. 2 in joint partnership with Step Up Silicon Valley, an organization focused on reducing poverty in the community. The event aims to immerse participants in the “reality of a Silicon Valley that grows in disparity as much as prosperity,” according to its advertisement.
Come the end of December, I will be officially out of work for seven years. The only reason that I'm not currently out on the street is a small inheritance I got when my dad died which the finance guy I picked up when I was still working is transferring to my bank account a little bit at a time.
I seriously doubt there'll be much of anything left once Social Security kicks in, which I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to be living on that for the rest of the way.
Oh well.
Know why I live where I currently do? Because I don't have anywhere near enough money to even acquire a functional (forget new) automobile, never mind keep one up. So I had to find a place that was close enough to a supermarket/pharmacy so I wouldn't have to call a cab every time I wanted to go to the grocery store or pick up a prescription.
I did find one. Eventually. For a few months, I was living out of various St. Louis-area cheap hotels and renting cars to get around so my credit card debt is off the charts.
The store/pharmacy's right across the street and there's another one a little bit farther up the street if the first one should go belly-up. Which sometimes happens. The neighborhood's not much to look at unless you enjoy bowling alleys and industrial-type stuff.
Beggars can't be choosers.
But it's a nice place. For me, anyway(just hope the rent doesn't go up too much next year). My situation being what it is, I learned pretty quickly that I can't go out and buy something just because I want it.
Like when my microwave died a couple months ago. Don't mourn too much, that thing was old when my dad died in 2001 so we got our money's worth. And I ordered a new, cheap one from Amazon (in my situation, you don't get top of the line) which arrived...several days back.
My TV died too. No picture but the sound comes in fine. That's not much of a problem for me since I don't get cable or Netflix or any of the rest of that stuff so the type of things I watch can quite easily be listened to. And I recently discovered Pluto TV and Tubi.
I watch both of those things on my smart phone which I wouldn't have one of unless my sister, who's always done rather well for herself, decided that I ought to have one, bought me one and put me on her family plan.
Which is something else for me to dread. My TV, my bank account, paying the rent, paying my electric and phone bills, basically my whole life is on that thing, thanks to those "app" things, so if something were to ever happen to that phone, I'd be screwed.
What am I getting at here [Damned if anybody knows, Johnson - Ed]? In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, "A man's got to know his limitations." When you don't have all the resources in the world and you won't ever again until the day you go home, you quickly learn two things.
How to prioritize. And how to improvise.
As Mick Jagger once put it, "You can't always get what you want."
You're welcome, Cupertino.
The city of Cupertino, California, will host a “Poverty Simulation” with two organizations designed to help the residents of Silicon Valley understand the poverty that surrounds the wealthy community.
The City of Cupertino and West Valley Community Services will sponsor the TWO-HOUR Poverty Simulation on Nov. 2 in joint partnership with Step Up Silicon Valley, an organization focused on reducing poverty in the community. The event aims to immerse participants in the “reality of a Silicon Valley that grows in disparity as much as prosperity,” according to its advertisement.
Come the end of December, I will be officially out of work for seven years. The only reason that I'm not currently out on the street is a small inheritance I got when my dad died which the finance guy I picked up when I was still working is transferring to my bank account a little bit at a time.
I seriously doubt there'll be much of anything left once Social Security kicks in, which I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to be living on that for the rest of the way.
Oh well.
Know why I live where I currently do? Because I don't have anywhere near enough money to even acquire a functional (forget new) automobile, never mind keep one up. So I had to find a place that was close enough to a supermarket/pharmacy so I wouldn't have to call a cab every time I wanted to go to the grocery store or pick up a prescription.
I did find one. Eventually. For a few months, I was living out of various St. Louis-area cheap hotels and renting cars to get around so my credit card debt is off the charts.
The store/pharmacy's right across the street and there's another one a little bit farther up the street if the first one should go belly-up. Which sometimes happens. The neighborhood's not much to look at unless you enjoy bowling alleys and industrial-type stuff.
Beggars can't be choosers.
But it's a nice place. For me, anyway(just hope the rent doesn't go up too much next year). My situation being what it is, I learned pretty quickly that I can't go out and buy something just because I want it.
Like when my microwave died a couple months ago. Don't mourn too much, that thing was old when my dad died in 2001 so we got our money's worth. And I ordered a new, cheap one from Amazon (in my situation, you don't get top of the line) which arrived...several days back.
My TV died too. No picture but the sound comes in fine. That's not much of a problem for me since I don't get cable or Netflix or any of the rest of that stuff so the type of things I watch can quite easily be listened to. And I recently discovered Pluto TV and Tubi.
I watch both of those things on my smart phone which I wouldn't have one of unless my sister, who's always done rather well for herself, decided that I ought to have one, bought me one and put me on her family plan.
Which is something else for me to dread. My TV, my bank account, paying the rent, paying my electric and phone bills, basically my whole life is on that thing, thanks to those "app" things, so if something were to ever happen to that phone, I'd be screwed.
What am I getting at here [Damned if anybody knows, Johnson - Ed]? In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, "A man's got to know his limitations." When you don't have all the resources in the world and you won't ever again until the day you go home, you quickly learn two things.
How to prioritize. And how to improvise.
As Mick Jagger once put it, "You can't always get what you want."
You're welcome, Cupertino.
3 comments:
I read the article down to the end before finding out that the city isn't being very specific about what the Poverty Simulation will actually include. Sounds like a lot of virtue signaling.
Or those kinds of exercises lots of public schools used to have where they graphically demonstrated to little kids what "prejudice" means.
We could probably have a fair amount of fun making up specifics for them, that is, examples of what a bunch of bureaucrats would consider poverty if it were them (for more than 2 hours)...
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