For the second time in as many months, I've seen a child enter a coffee shop selling things to customers. Neither child looked alike, they were different ages and ethnicities, but both looked desperate, confused, empty. Scared. Scared...in Des Moines, Iowa, the middle of America, there are children walking around scared selling their own shit.

Last month, while I was in Smokey Row off of MLK, a chubby white boy from the neighborhood who couldn't have been older than 12 was walking up to each table and chair and barely-breathing customer, and asking if someone wanted to buy a video game he was holding for $10, or $8, or anything they wanted to give him, any dollars. With each solicitation, he received a warm rejection - but a rejection nonetheless. At the time, I had regretted being so cold to him. I was quite cold, too. I'm not sure why. I think maybe his awkward situation scared me - to be a child wandering among strangers trying to sell a video game for cash, and then walking a long way home (he went over the horizon) empty handed seemed too much for me. I still feel guilty the way I stared him in the eyes, paused and said, "No." I think in my reasoning, I was trying to scare him away. As if my cold reaction would thrust him into the world of strange adults, and he would turn back home before someone really hurt him. But it didn't. He was numb to me. Jesus Christ.

Today, at Caribou in Ankeny, a much younger boy, brown skin, maybe Latino, no older than seven, walked in and began soliciting homemade chocolate covered apples for $5. He had a bin of them, maybe a baker's dozen. He looked positively frightened. He stuttered. He wasn't sure what to say in response to anything, "How much are they? Where did you get these?" All of it fell on deaf ears as he gyrated around uncomfortably, smashing his hands together in front of him and awkwardly pursing his lips, not making eye contact.

Homemade chocolate covered apples? I didn't see where he came from, and I couldn't make out where he went off to, but there are some apartments west of here, so it's possible he'd come down from them. He didn't want to be here. No way in hell. Someone sent him.

What does this mean? It means people are trying to make money. They're trying to find a way. They're willing to take a slight risk to make a living. But this isn't the goddamn turn of the 20th century - or is it? Is this that same "turn of the century" in the 21st? Are we at that time of great poverty and greater risks? Are two world wars looming ahead of us before things settle back down? 

A friend of mine and I had lunch together today at a place off Hubble, a pupusaria over by Leachman Lumber. We rarely talk politics, but something that came up was the strange state of affairs we're entering.

We're entering a time in our country that's pivotal. We're beginning to realize that the sickness with which we've become accustomed cannot continue. We're blaming that ape Trump, but he's simply the conduit. We're beginning to realize that business cannot continue as usual. We can't continue with systematic racism, shooting every black man, woman and child in the back while they're on the ground in handcuffs. We can't continue with legal slave labor by hiring illegal immigrants, stealing their human rights and forcing them to work on our farms or in our construction outfits without paying them a living wage. In fact, as it turns out, we may be realizing that we need to start paying everyone a living wage. And we can't continue shitting all over women by not paying them, by forcing them into stereotypes and gender roles, by raping them and covering it up (fuck your school, release those goddamned numbers you money grubbing universities), and on and on.

We're somehow coming to terms with the fact that white men cannot continue to control everything. They simply cannot.

And maybe these little boys selling things in coffee shops is the trickle before the dam bursts? Maybe a scarier time, or at least one of great uncertainty, is edging closer and closer.

No maybe about it.