"The beauty of me is that I'm very rich." "The point is, you can never be too greedy." "I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier."
“My entire life, I've watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn't the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office. How smart can they be? They're morons. There's a perception that voters like poverty. I don't like poverty. Usually, there's a reason for poverty. Do you want someone who gets to be president and that's literally the highest paying job he's ever had?”
-Donald Trump
In 2015, I was walking south of MLK searching for old railroad tracks. I came upon two homeless men arguing over liquor - one was too drunk to stand and fight, the other was just trying to offer his friend water. I may have been one of the last people to see both men together, although, regretfully, I failed to take a picture of the pair. Mark Allen Thomsen, 46, sobered up enough that night to squirt a bottle of lighter fluid on his water-offering friend, set him on fire and killed him. When police arrested Mark, he was so intoxicated he had to be admitted to Methodist hospital until he could be stabilized and released. He's now serving 36 years.
April 1st, 2016, Des Moines police found the charred remains of a human being near a burnt shed in a homeless camp. Investigators never identified the victim.
January 26th, 2018, I met a man named Marshall outside of the camps near CISS. Articulate, good looking, pleasant, inquisitive, self-aware and braving the odds. He asked me why I was taking pictures of the homeless. He wondered if I'd seen the trash strewn about everywhere just the day before - prior to everyone coming together to clean up. "We're not animals," he said, "we're people. We're just homeless." He told me that CISS - the Central Iowa Shelter & Services - was banning people left and right for anything (tuning into the evening police scanner can confirm this, if you're bored).
This large influx of homeless to CISS recently began when Hubbell developers, working with the snakes in City Hall, began knocking down overgrown and wooded areas south of MLK between SW 11th and SW 16th in order to turn the old Factory District into "Gray's Landing", described by wealthy elite as "a small city within the city" with "competitively priced" condos. In other words, the rich are kicking out the poor so they can build another playground to make this shithole city look "better". The homeless must find somewhere to go, and so they go to the shelter. And the shelter kicks them out. Thus, tents on the lawn.
Isn't it a shame that a city like Des Moines can't figure this out? Isn't it a shame that our country can't figure this out? In 2018, we're banning millions of immigrants from our country, we're kicking out millions more, and we're leaving our own homeless out on the streets. You think this is making America great again? You must not know shit about where this country came from, or how it made it here.