I was having a beer with a German lady, and we talked of many things. And because I was I and she was she, we wound up on the topic of the poor, and she included in her sentence the fragment:
German lady: ...and your "social services", if you can call it that...
Which made me smile. And I noted how I liked that she made sure to put finger quotes around "social services", and that I liked it because it is rare that I get to talk to someone who thinks that we, in fact, do not go above and beyond in taking care of our people.
She said, "Yeah, like, there is a lady in a van who came and parked outside of my house. And she has six cats. And it's not very sanitary because the litter box is in the van, and she lives there with the cats. She's been there for about two months."
And I, with my American brain, kept waiting for her to get to the point in the story in which she called the police but they never came to remove her, and then I would say how sad it was that that was her only option, to live in a van with her cats... because that's the way these conversations usually go when I talk to people about such things.
But that point about calling the police never came. The point was that the lady lived in a van with her cats.
My friend continued, "And I wonder about what brought her to living that way, and it's hard to believe that there's nobody to help her." No social services, sans finger quotes, to help this lady have a better life than living in a van with six cats.
"But you all," Americans, she means, "Are used to it because it is what you see all the time."
And she shook her head, because she is not used to it at all.
