The meaning of my protracted absence will be ignored for now. After conferring with the general council it has been decided that too much public disclosure would damage our sphere's rehabilitation programming. Although noting that may have the identical effect...
The United States' economy faltered prior to my sentencing to this sphere. Indeed, so, too, did the rest of the sphere's major industrial states. They feared an economic depression - so called for its lull in revenue and submerged assets, tumbling debt, and the general attitude of its victims - but have settled since on the term recession, as if this were a tide that would eventually, given the grace of its blasted satellite, return. Economic indicators state that the "recession" itself ended sometime in the last revolution's summer. And yet millions are still without jobs. And millions more are homeless.
Homelessness is no fine thing on this sphere. While we have most everything we need on our person and spend much of our developing stage itinerant, humans without homes are miserable in every way that we are not.
Humans sweat much more than we do. I do not know if this is a result of their atmosphere, sun, stunted evolution - I am not a biologist. But the fact is clearly read on the grease-streaked countenances of their pubescent offspring and the melted dirt seemingly fused into the cracks of their homeless. It is a fine grime which adds to the smell of creatures which must regularly defecate, urinate, spit, consume, etc. Compounded onto this sanitary hazard are the numerous accumulations of oil and toxins which swamp the cities' darker areas.
Humans are, by nature, hoarders. Some study has been done into this neurological malady but the majority of them have yet to understand that it is a condition which affects their species to a one. They need with an incessant rapaciousness. Because of their status/family structures this is often sublimated by their houses and communities. The community provides some outlet for a collective use system: security, recreational facilities, stimulation. But houses do as they are defined: house the young, the electricity and its dependent devices, the animals (parrots, chinchillas), the food and the cleansing facilities. I have noted several jacuzzis.
As you may imagine these required elements vary in price. And the costs of maintaining them is expensive. Once a man or woman or family becomes homeless these "necessities" are rebranded as "luxuries." In most industrial societies - but to a great extent in the United States - to be without home or readily-accessible food is seen as a failure to comply with the general system. And therefore homeless are failures.
Curiously, the failure is not perceived as taking place in the system but rather within the individuals who could not keep up with it. It is a disadvantage to their short lifespans that they do not perceive this perpetual race to both acquire and pay for their things a contradictory affair that ends, universally, with their having died either above the curve or below it but never beyond it. Some renounce their possessions to follow spiritual or religious dogmas. Some profess alternate forms of government, such as Communism or Social Democracy. For all of their imaginations these problems persist. I have no suggestions, myself.
What is certainly verifiable, however, is that those who slip from this perpetual race into homelessness rarely rejoin "civilized" society, and those whose salary exceeds 99% of every other worker on the planet never require its permission.
From all of the media you have had me scour I see the richest cluster of this sphere indulge in charity, finance private versions of governmental organizations (such as first-aid, space programs, research), and extend to the public their varying creeds of independence and hard work. They are lauded for their transcendence of the "work-a-day" world and held as paragons of enterprising idolatry. Those who remain homeless, meanwhile, are seen as unfortunate remainders in what must be a very complicated human equation.
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