The New Reality?

Many people question just how bad social conditions can get if the economy deteriorates further. After all, they say, we live in a civilized society with a safety net that can help those who find themselves in dire straits.

Unfortunately, such views don’t necessarily square with reality. Even now, in the midst of a so-called recovery, some urban down-and-outers have decided that a more primitive approach to survival is called for, as the New York Post reports in “‘Game’ Time in B’klyn”:

It’s a little slice of Alabama in the middle of Brooklyn.

A pack of vagrants was found living in a makeshift camp alongside the Prospect Park lake, where they poached the local wildlife using cruel hunting methods, officials said yesterday.

The dirty-dozen men and women have spent the last two months on the lake’s southern shore near a construction site for a $70 million ice-skating complex.

They have littered the area with beer cans, poaching nets and other trash, with much of the refuse winding up in the lake.

“It’s disgusting,” said wildlife advocate Johanna Clearfield. “The city doesn’t care, because it’s the poor side of the park. This wouldn’t happen on the Park Slope side or by Grand Army Plaza.

“The most they’ve done is issue fines to homeless people who can’t pay.”

The drifters have been illegally trapping and cooking up the critters that call the park home, including squirrels, ducks and swan-like cygnets.

They used crude tactics to hunt their prey, including barbed fishing hooks that ripped off the top half of one poor gosling’s beak. They then cooked the meat over illegal fires. Some of the animals were eaten raw.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean the streets of New York (and other cities) will be overrun with aggressive hunter-gathers as the economy cycles down. In fact, many of those who see or are worried about hard times ahead have decided to act now. They are stockpiling necessities before the stuff really hits the fan. Unfortunately, as the latest Dilbert cartoon suggests (in Scott Adams’ humorous but characteristically spot-on way), that may not be the perfect solution either.