America Is Hurting One could write about all the UFO sightings every day and not mention the same one twice. It is hard to imagine this hasn’t caused more people to want answers. Yes, there are plenty of us that do, but I guess many others are too busy trying to just get along in these hard times. I usually don’t talk about what is happening in our country, but it is getting harder to ignore. One of the news casters here in New York went down to ride the subway. I don’t know if he was going to work or somewhere else and I guess it doesn’t matter. The important thing was he came upon a group of homeless people and one ran up to him and knocked him to the ground. It was a lucky thing he wasn’t pushed onto the track. The other part of the story is he couldn’t get up because he smashed his knee on the concrete of the station and two other homeless people ran over to help him. I feel very sorry for the homeless. Many of them are veterans who things just didn’t work out for. Some were so traumatized when they returned from places like Afghanistan and Iraq, they needed help to get back into society and never received it. There are others who need mental help. Years ago, mental hospitals like Creedmoor in Queens, New York held about 10,000 patients. Then it happened, the governor at the time decided we didn’t need all those people in the hospital and had most of them released. At the turn of the last century Creedmoor was down to 600 patients. The governor was reducing the mental health budget without considering what was going to happen to all those mentally ill people who were released. While he reduced the budget in one area, in another it increased dramatically in those years. The reason was many of the mentally ill were landing up in jail. The irony budget wise is the fact it costs more at the time to house a person in jail for a day than to keep them in the hospital for that same day. One thing we should have learned by now, these people need help and giving them needles and such is not the answer. In some places the homeless are getting as much as $800 a month and maybe more, I have not looked into that thoroughly. I saw one homeless man who moved to an area where checks were given out every month and he said this was great, he was given money for doing nothing and would be crazy not to stay in that area. He said nothing about moving into a shelter, or even better looking for a job. I never thought I would see such a turn around in crime in New York City and other cities and not much is being done except to weaken laws even further. Certain crimes are no longer punishable. Criminals are continually let out without bail and one criminal was said to have been arrested and released sixteen times in just a couple of days. This would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. New York City was picked as the safest city in the country just a few years ago, until it was thought laws should be changed so criminals would mostly go unpunished. Under the mayor at the time with the help of the commissioner and deputy commissioner the smallest crimes called broken windows brought the police down on you. If you jumped a turnstile in the subway, you were arrested and many times it was found there were outstanding warrants. The same was true for many other minor crimes on the street. Today the amount of turnstile jumpers has dramatically increased because they know nothing will happen to them. It is getting to a point where the police don’t want to arrest anyone because they will just be turned loose. It is more than that however. Police don’t want to have to fight charges. The police seem to be getting shot and even killed at a much higher rate all over the country. Criminals have lost respect for the police, because they feel it is the police who are handcuffed. Unfortunately, that is true. We need to have the laws changed. The new mayor of New York City went to Albany the state capital and addressed the politicians and asked for some of the laws to be changed and even with all this crime taking place he was turned down. It would seem the politicians there like the crime the way it is. While crime is one of the main things bothering people, there are other highly rated obstacles causing distress in their lives. One problem is with education, which was missing for the past couple of years. Politicians on school boards have nothing but distain for the parents when they speak up and some have even classified the parents as terrorists. Free speech has really been suffering lately and the problem in the schools is one which is at the top of the parents complaint list. The country is hurting from so many wounds and is in dire straits.
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