Why I will Be There - David Glenn Cox

By David Glenn Cox

It is a simple question with perhaps a million or more answers. No matter how similar our answers may be or how diverse, it has become obvious that this is not the America of our birth. In our everyday life we push money through slots and take orders from machines.

The computers in our cars can be used as evidence against us in court as surveillance cameras watch our every move. This it is said, is for our protection, isn’t it always for our own protection? It is the fear, that motivating fear, that fear that makes us shut up. I was coming home from Milwaukee Wisconsin when they pulled a man out of line at the airport for addition screening. This was an old and frail man, not a day under seventy and they pulled him from the line and patted him down as he held his hands up in the air and they ran the sniffer around his body.

It was an outrage to see anyone treated in such a fashion but to see an elderly man treated this way was outrageous obscenity in a so called “free country” to me. I could have said something, and I will regret to my dying day not saying anything, but I was on a business trip. I was flying with someone else and I had to get home and I had to be at work the next day. It was the fear of what could happen to me if I spoke out that shut me up. We were all travelers and the authorities knew that, they knew that we all had places to be, so they use the fear of delaying our trip to deny us our rights as Americans.

We are forced to take off our shoes and empty our pockets because they want you and me to think of all those other people in line with us as our potential enemies. They want to divide us and make us fear each other, because it is fear which is being used as a tool of government. Innocent people should not fear government, yet the police cars that were once blue or yellow are now jet black with dark tinted windows and strange menacing antennae mounted on the roof. I lived in a town of 20,000 people that had had one murder in three years and yet the city had a SWAT team and owned an armored personnel carrier. Is this the America that we want for our children?

That was all in my past life though, my life in that more prosperous nation of the past. That was before I lost my business, that was before I lost my house and before I began sleeping in a garage and began my two years of homelessness in America.

I was a husband and a father, a business owner, a licensed Real Estate agent, a polling clerk, assistant poll manager. President of my home owners association, I remodeled two houses to live in and worked on my 1965 Mustang for fun.
I was a semi professional musician and won national awards for my musical compositions. I was a freelance writer and a heavy equipment operator. I worked five and six days a week for over twenty five years without ever missing a paycheck but when the bottom fell out of the economy I began my new profession as a homeless man in America.

I slept in a garage and I washed in a bucket, I began to see this country with new eyes. I would walk to the library to use the computer and cars would blow the horn at me while I was in the crosswalk. Was my right of way now of a lower order than theirs? There would always be a crowd in front of the library before it opened and though our appearance may have differed, we were all quite the same. We were black and white, male and female, young and old and all unemployed and we were all struggling. I met a man living in his car and another living under a bridge and washing in the creek.

I heard a school teacher cry trying to get a copy of her last pay stub so that she could apply for welfare. I met an elderly grandmother who picked up aluminum cans along the side of the highway in the hot Georgia sun. I’ve seen their furniture stacked outside of their homes on streets filled with a sea of “for sale” signs.

I met a man at Burger King and he, like I, was buying a dollar cheeseburger. He acknowledged me from across the room as if he knew me and in a way he did know me. He could tell from my own ragged clothes and dirty shoes that I was like him, that I was of him, we were brothers. We struck up a conversation as if we had known one another for years. I could tell from his clothes and shaggy hair that he was of me as well. It was at that moment that I understood I was of something bigger than just myself, that I was connected to my fellow man by more than just labels and badges or meaningless titles.

I would talk with these people and they would tell me their stories and I would tell them mine and our stories were all the same, a salesman for Delphi electronics, a painting contractor, a school teacher, a warehouse worker and the stories would all end with, “and then I lost my job.”

There is something very wrong here, these people were all innocents and they had done nothing wrong except to believe in a system that didn’t believe in them.
That’s wrong, that’s not conservative or liberal politics, that’s just wrong! Ten million home foreclosures, that’s forty million people along with fourteen million unemployed.

The banks were bailed out and the insurance companies too, but for those living under bridges and sleeping in their cars they got only the run around. Fill out this form and your call is very important to us. Thursday (DARPA) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency fired off an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile carrying a hypersonic glider as its payload. The vehicle is designed to fly at speeds of mach 20 and to deliver a payload anywhere on earth in less than sixty minutes.

The only purpose for such a vehicle, the only purpose under the sun which this vehicle could serve would be as a first strike nuclear weapons delivery system. The flight was aborted after a minute or two as was the previous flight and no cost figures were released to the public, do they need to be? Does this country need a first strike nuclear capability? Until the Bush administration the United States renounced the policy of first strike nuclear weapons. We are laying off school teachers and building first strike nuclear missiles? Missiles that if ever used would make all of us in this country culpable as war criminals.

One million American school children are homeless on any given night and yet these missile programs are still funded? Something must change, we must make something change, we must wake this country and shake this country and that is why I will be there in Washington. I’m coming to represent the homeless and the unemployed, because the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever known to mankind is poverty.