30 Dead in Greyhoud Bus Crash

According to an article on The Onion, a Greyhound bus crash killed 30 people traveling from Rochester to Albany.

Reading this makes me amazed at how much disdain our country has for our homeless.

My father was in the National Guard for 20 years. He was drafted for Desert Storm, but thankfully was not sent overseas. I think about what our lives would be like if he had become injured and couldn't work every time I hear of how many homeless vets there are. Every time I read a story about the deteriorating conditions of the vet hospitals in this country. When I see their faces, it's a glimpse of what my life could have been had everything not turned out alright.

Being poor, living paycheck to paycheck and constantly having to just barely make it (if you're lucky) tears away at your soul, bit by bit. I've been fortunate to always have a roof over my head, and three meals a day. Even if there were times when that's pretty much the only things I had.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and poverty is by far one of the top motivators for people drinking or doing drugs.

Most of us don't think about the reasons on why people do what they do. If someone looks the part, then that's all they must be. We always believe that the bad guys are when we perceived them to be when we were little; characters. Exaggerated images ripped out of a bedtime story.

The bad guy is not always the big, swarthy villain we read about as a child. They take all shapes, all sizes, and it's always the person you'd least expect.

All those people who died were somebody's daughter, son, perhaps mother or father. Yet they are described as "degenerate sacks of shit".

Empathy is truly a dying emotion in this country.