My kid's generation doesn't really have a shred of hope, does it?

[Shoonra]

95. About that "Horatio Alger nonsense"

Hardly anyone today has actually read a Horatio Alger book and thinks its all Sunday School warm fuzzy talk about hard work being rewarded. In actuality, no. Alger's books were about dirt poor boys who were forced by circumstances to take the lowest, most dead-end jobs (such as shoe shining) - and by pure dumb luck and by showing great physical courage and strength in a brief moment of crisis (e.g., a runaway horse, the ice on the pond breaking beneath someone), saving the life of the richest man in town or his daughter and thereby being made his son and heir and never having to work hard again.

Here's what I see in the heart of the great metropolis: I see people - mostly men, but some women and some couples - living in alleys, living in sleeping bags, or blankets, or rags last laundered so long ago I don't want to examine them closely. Some look old. many look sickly or malnourished. They are vulnerable to the weather, to every sort of illness, to marauders and psychopaths. Even crazy people don't want to live like that. The system has failed them, and it has told them that they are the failures.