It's an ancient tradition derived from the scapegoat of Leviticus whereby the wrongs of others are transferred to an innocent
who's then sent out alone to die symbolically bearing others' sins absolving from greed, lust, pride and hate the community that condemned him.
A corpse is laid out, sin eater employed to eat bread and salt from its belly thereby absorbing the corpse's sins for the wages of just a few pennies.
Relegated to the wrong side of the tracks in housing fallen to disrepair destitute even of hope a place one stumbles only in error.
The poor clean the toilets, wait the tables, kill the meat and mow the lawns, raise the children of the "upper" classes, walk their pampered dogs and park their cars.
They assemble the latest electronics, sew our blue jeans and our wedding gowns. When we buy cheap Chinese goods at Wal-Mart they're the "associates" who check us out.
The poor care for other people's parents left alone and sad in nursing homes. They're the receptionists in upscale spas, the charming girls in nail salons.
They're dishwashers who scrape half-full plates left by those who can afford to go out to eat. They stock store shelves and work in warehouses where corporations ship and receive.
They empty bed pans and wipe up vomit. They're janitors and maintenence men. And a lot of them help to build the jails they're disproportionately incarcerated in.
The people they serve hardly speak to them though they provide indispensible services because they're living proof of a "lower" class, which makes most Americans nervous.
The fact that they exist at all is a slap in the face of the American polity, so they're treated like a shameful excresence on the ass of American society.
But like the ghetto homelands of South Africa, America has embarrassing pockets of poverty. And the economic apartheid we practice makes the poor exiles in their own country.
And when the poor are all used up, having been consumed by predatory corporations, they're discarded like so much garbage for being too old, too sick or disabled.
These castoffs through no fault of their own are condemned by the corporate supremacists who looted their pensions and 401Ks to eke out a long and miserable existence.
It's gone on so long it seems normal, and corporate-owned media report it that way. It's as if poverty were invisible and America's conscience had been mislaid.
Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).
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