The author is visiting parts of the US that corporate agents will not allow you to see on TV, but yet a growing population are living like this. In his visit to LA he offers some graphic descriptions of Americans he encounters.
It was now light, and I had made my way to Skid Row. Nearly five thousand homeless people live here. On sidewalk after sidewalk, they have set up their crude dwellings made up mostly of tarps and cardboard. I saw shopping carts all over, and a few bicycles. Bodies lay on cardboard, bedding or sometimes just concrete, but trash was generally confined to trash cans. There was a commotion at 5th and Gladys, with cops and an ambulance, and people were speculating that it might have been a stabbing.In another report he offers some snapshots of his visit to Oakland, like this one:
I saw a young woman, draped with a thin comforter, who’d crouch down often to pick something from the ground. At first I thought she was scavenging cigarette butts, then I realized she was picking up anything that wasn’t stuck to the sidewalk, a tiny scrap of paper, a dry leaf, a match stump, a candy wrapper… Not content to pick up the pieces, she’d kneel down on the concrete to arrange them, to give them order and meaning.
