The South is such an interesting social habitat. Unfortunately, a lot of what makes it interesting is its overabundance of perfectly avoidable human tragedy.
In the downtown of Charlotte, NC, there is an older couple that camps out on a bench in front of Discovery Place, a children's science museum right on Tryon Street.
They've been there as long as I have worked in the city, which is going on seven years.
They sit and knit things for sale. One day I asked them what their story was - they were laid-off textile workers, both of them. Products of the great moving-away of the jobs that first brought the industrial revolution to the South.. then ended it.
The man, if grizzled, was fit. The woman had a sallow complexion, droopy eyes, a certain indefinable sluggishness. At times she seems unresponsive to anything. At other times, oblivious to the danger of just walking slowly across one of the busiest streets in a city where jaywalking is just not a good idea.
Problem is, her condition was definable alright.
She was an untreated diabetic.
She was an untreated diabetic. I suspect for quite some time, an undiagnosed one - in plain sight. Just right there were thousands of people, myself included, saw her sometimes knitting, sometimes just staring down the street, all day long.
A couple of times I bought things from them. They're good work, actually. Potholders are always useful...and make cute gifts.
Sometime last year, the woman vanished for a while. It was just the man..sometimes. He looked lonely and disengaged. These folks had never begged before, now he started to do so.
Then one day she returned, in a motor chair...with one leg amputated just below the knee.
She had finally gotten treated for her diabetes. Someone had taken notice at last.
I have seen the leprosy of our age, up close and personal. Undiagnosed diabetes. And I have reacted, for years, with the traditional aversion. I looked away as much as I possibly could.
Because I did for years, because almost all of my fellow Charlotteans did, that woman now has both of her legs missing.
In these parts,every so often, you will see a car with a crass bumper sticker declaring "UNRECONSTRUCTED", over a Stars and Bars banner. Less so than further south, but often enough to make a person cringe. Like associating with committing great death and harm in the name of racism and slavery was something to be proud of.
These days you see more teabagger and Obama = Hitler tags. Cut from the same belligerent and bigoted sticky paper, stuck to the behinds of the same cars as before.
Unreconstructed, indeed.
Well, you want to know what their unreconstructed health care and social welfare system looks like?
It looks like a double amputee without health insurance and no health care, sitting in a donated motor chair dependent on the urgent begging of her equally homeless husband, that's what it looks like.