# Gehenna



## Jim (Feb 16, 2022)

I walked through Skid Row today, just to see it. It's worse than I even thought it would be. It's fucking unbelievable. 

There's this funny thing ... I used to be hardcore Christian, and there's a place called Gehenna, in Israel. It's where the ancient Israelites would dump their trash and sewage, and burn it. It was just one giant valley full of everything people didn't want in their cities ... constantly on fire, constantly smelling like death. The word Gehenna is actually the name for this valley, and it was a very real place, but in modern Bibles, it's often translated as Hell. 

Skid Row made me think of Gehenna. It's one neighborhood where everybody who nobody wants around can go, and fill the streets with shit and piss, and drugs and crime and death. It smells awful. It's full of people that are either below the bottom rung of the capitalist ladder, and people who serve the system as guards to ensure that the bums don't step too far out of line. Stay here, and we'll leave you alone. Alone to rot. Alone, to depend on the charity of some kind strangers ...

But it shouldn't be this way. We shouldn't do this. Humanity shouldn't be this way. God, we were never supposed to ... How did it ever get to be this way? 

Los Angeles failed. America failed. Capitalism failed. We created a travesty. We created hell on earth. We don't deserve forgiveness for this.

I'm not even blaming anyone, not anyone in particular. It's just ... everything. It's ALL fucked up. There are so many knots to untie that you couldn't untangle this thing without just fucking it up further. So what do you do? Stick a knife in there and cut the ropes? How many innocent people will get hurt because we have allowed an inhuman system to rule our lives and establish itself so deeply that we cannot see how to live without it? 

This doesn't really have a point. It's just a lament, really.


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