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“Parents didn’t have to vet daycare centers. There were all of these older women and couples living here who would take the a few of the kids a couple of days per week. If the weather wasn’t too bad for them to walk to the community center it didn’t really matter which one had them. All of the kids would spend the day at the community center playing indoor games in the winter and swimming in the summer. This trailer park as you and the others view it was a village which raised a child until the upper one percent decided we shouldn’t exist.”
“When the public toilet scum of Wall Street decided to trash the economy with their fraud, lots of people lost both their livelihood and their life. Did you ever see the movie The Big Short?”
I nodded.
“Do you remember the line about every one percent increase in unemployment brings with it forty thousand deaths?” she asked.
I nodded again.
“Well it was more than that for these bastards. People didn’t just lose their jobs, they lost their homes and families. Even people who didn’t lose their jobs lost their homes and families if they were renting and the owner quit making payments. Ordinary middle class families found themselves engaging in prostitution and drug dealing just to get by. People around here who would never have even thought about doing anything which could send them to prison were getting either locked up or shot in droves. Some parents even sold their teenage kids into prostitution just to have some place to stay and the ability to buy groceries. To this day there are still twelve women that I know of living in this park who are prostitutes. Most try to hide it using things like Tinder and Craig’s List to arrange cash money dates, but three have fallen so far they don’t bother. They’re street walkers. They told their neighbors and promised never to bring dates back here.”
“Odd such a tight knit community would allow such a thing” I accidentally said out loud.
“It isn’t anymore” Melony answered. “This used to be a small town. Everyone knew everyone. The people living here were either young couples building a life for themselves or older people riding off into their final sunset. It worked. The little kids kept them more active than they ever would have been on their own and those of us in the middle earned money while helping take care of the place. It was the real world embodiment of Mayberry RFD. The street walkers are far from the worst of what has moved in here after Wall Street’s nuclear strike on the global economy.”
“Those three trailers you passed on the way here. They are what is left of Julie’s family” Melony offered.
“Julie?” I queried.
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