A five minute walk from the financial district that I’m staying in, in DTLA
You see a lot of poverty, homelessness, people on the streets looking disheveled and mentally unwell
You see areas that look like they have a lot of crime and addiction
You put your hands in your pockets and keep a hold of your valuables

It’s funny to think that there are people who never see this sort of thing
They’re flown into a city, paid to stay in the swankiest, most upmarket parts
Then flown out again, to another posh part of another city
Where they’re paid very well to do their job

They live in a bubble, where they never see hardship or suffering
It’s no wonder they can’t relate or empathise
A five minute walk, but an ideology a million miles away

But what am I supposed to make of that?
Here, on my holiday
I see it everywhere I go,
The class divide
The way people of wealth and wellbeing
Justify this imbalance to themselves

The way I can just walk on by,
Turn a blind eye to suffering
I’m trying hard not to burst into a chorus of
Phil Collin’s patronising 1989 hit, “Another Day In Paradise”
But you know what I mean

I like it here, though.
I like the way everything in abundance is here
I like the melting together of cultures
I like the good nature of strangers
The openness and the honesty
It sits well with me
I like it here

But just as everything is bigger in the USA
So is the challenge to make change
I can’t imagine how it must be
When you feel you have no voice
In a place so big and faceless
Where corporate bank sky scrapers
Stand tall, casting a shadow on the people below
From up there, you can’t see humanity
Or hear the people on the streets maybe saying,
“To be sane in a world of madmen is in itself madness.”