I guess the $3 and $4 and $5, sometimes $10, at a time, that I could never really afford and that I spent anyway at Starbucks over the years don't matter to you at all. You'll team up with any rich person to make things more painful for me.
The ads produced specifically by corporate Starbucks to promote crime and personally target me. The Wet Floor signs permanently left on dry floor. The coughing by staff and customers. The usually dirty bathrooms that customer service people in the second decade of the 21st century seem to think it's not their job to clean, and where I turn off the light when I can and hope there's no hidden cameras when I can't. The Starbucks where a male customer sat next to me and coughed several times a minute until I objected and started taking his picture to publish online as a harasser, at which point he and a few other customers started yelling at me. That ended by him being given his own table by the manager and my being escorted from the premises by the police while the manager brought the smiling harasser a cup of water, even though I had called the police first because of what was happening. I was told never to go to that Starbucks again.
The spring and part of the summer of 2014, when I was working and work started at 7:00 a.m. The only places open where I could get food when I left the shelter at or before 6 a.m. were the Dunkin' Donuts and the Starbucks near Broadway Station. Guests of the Pine Street Inn aren't allowed to keep food in their lockers, so if I were going to buy food, I had to buy what I could from the places that were open. Did you think that I WANTED to spend $20/day on food, from my $10/hour salary?
Even when I buy food at the grocery store, once the people who produce it know, from invasions of my privacy, that I have bought their product, they often change the packaging to be degrading to me. That has happened over and over since 2011. It is also something that many businesses that produce food have done, even when I have never bought their food. Food shopping is always depressing and upsetting, like almost every other chore that I have to do, because I am tormented everywhere, by an unbelievable number of people who really think that I deserve what is happening to me.
Why would it be happening if I didn't deserve it? That's probably what they think. Why does anything happen that someone doesn't deserve, whether it's someone being persecuted by one person or thousands of people being persecuted by thousands of people, or one person being persecuted by thousands of people?
That something is happening doesn't mean that it's right. It's incredible how many people who have no difficulty thinking of all the times in their lives when people were unfair to THEM, who talk about their unhappiness and their pain, can degrade me in the same sentence that they're using to talk about poor, damaged them; people I've never had anything to do with in my life, people who don't know anything about me except for what they've heard from the conglomerate's propaganda or from people who don't realize that my blogs are not the result of my being delusional. I am systematically, viciously dehumanized to an extreme that I don't know has ever happened before to one person, by so many people, for such a long time. NOBODY could deserve what is happening to me.
Copyright L. Kochman, March 25, 2016 @ 4:20 p.m.
