NEW YORK (PNN) - December 8, 2013 - At a time when Wall Street is absolutely swimming in wealth, New York City is experiencing an epidemic of homelessness. The last time there was this many homeless children in New York City was during the days of the Great Depression; and the number of homeless children in the Fascist Police States of Amerika overall recently set a new all-time record.

There are now 1.2 million public school children in Amerika that are homeless, and that number has gone up by about 72% since the start of the Second Great Depression, Amerikans like to think of themselves as “the wealthiest nation on the planet”, and yet the number of young children that don’t even have a roof over their heads at night just keeps skyrocketing.

There truly are two Amerikas today, and unfortunately most Amerikans that live in “good Amerika” don’t seem to really care too much about the extreme suffering that is going on in “bad Amerika”. In the end, what kind of price will we all pay for neglecting the most vulnerable members of our society?

If you live in “good Amerika”, I very much encourage you to read an excellent piece about homelessness in New York City that was just published in The New York Times. What some young children have to go through on a nightly basis should break all of our hearts.

She wakes to the sound of breathing. The smaller children lie tangled beside her, their chests rising and falling under winter coats and wool blankets. A few feet away, their mother and father sleep near the mop bucket they use as a toilet. Two other children share a mattress by the rotting wall where the mice live, opposite the baby, whose crib is warmed by a hair dryer perched on a milk crate.

Could you imagine having your own family live like that? The name of the little girl in the story is Dasani, and every night her family sleeps in a city-run homeless shelter that sounds like it is straight out of a horror movie.

Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.

It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in Amerika.

Sadly, there are countless other children just like Dasani that live like this day after day, month after month, year after year.

Shouldn’t we be able to do better than this as a society? After all, the stock market has been hovering near record highs lately, and Wall Street is absolutely drenched with wealth for the moment.

With so much wealth floating around, why are New York City subways being overrun with homeless right now?

Something has gone horribly wrong.