If you look closely at this, it's not a pretty picture at all.

Institute Park, Worcester, MA, originally uploaded by Claudia Snell.

It looks like a pretty picture of Institute Park in Worcester, Massachusetts, and it is. It's also a picture of some people who have fallen through the cracks somehow and are now homeless. If you look closely at the gazebo you can see people are sleeping in there. The red is their shopping cart full of belongings. You can also see what looks like a pile of blue stuff - it's two human beings sleeping in a sleeping bag.

This is the corner of Salisbury and Park Ave. in Worcester, MA. It's a beautiful place, one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. It's not unlike a lot of nice neighborhoods where the people who live there think this stuff is (and should stay) a million miles from their lives. For those of you who think screaming NIMBY will make this stuff go away, you are wrong it is IYBY(in your back yard). They have no where else to go. Wake up.

These people did not grow up hoping to end up this way. I have no idea what combination of bad luck and bad choices have brought them here but the fact is, they are here and you can't just ignore it. People do not just evaporate because it is inconvenient to think about them or you've written them off because you assume they deserve their fate. Please try to remember that while you are voting to eliminate services by cutting your own tax dollars. Please try to elect people that will have the vision and intelligence to understand that our world has problems and we must work together to fix them. Please help put people into office that will know how to maximize our tax dollars for the betterment of ALL not just the "golden few". Unfortunately, too many of our current leaders have been more worried about those "golden few". We must put a stop to this.

The problem exists - now how do we want to deal with it?

Originally posted on I'm From Worcester by Claudia Snell