LAS VEGAS, ANOTHER VIEW

We are all aware of the Hollywood depiction of Las Vegas as a fun-loving city, full of casinos, nightclubs and good times, but the reality for its growing homeless numbers is far from idylic. As jobs and homes disappear many of the dispossessed street dwellers are subject to attacks of violence. Now even the the streets are being abandoned by the homeless. "Some of the Las Vegas homeless resort to living in a maze of underground flood channels beneath the Strip. There they face flash floods, disease, black widows and dank, pitch-dark conditions, but some tunnel dwellers say life there is better than being harassed and threatened by assailants and the police. “Out there, anything goes,” said Manny Lang, who has lived in the tunnels for months, recalling the stones and profanities with which a group of teenagers pelted him last winter when he slept above ground. “But in here, nothing’s going to happen to us.”
(New York Times, 7 August) In one of the most sophisticated urban areas in the world some members of the working class are living like sewer rats. What a hellish system capitalism is.
RD