Alley Cat Allies @ www.alleycat.org.

Spending half an hour or so trying to help clean and winterize (and trap and neuter) in support of the feral cat population under the boardwalk in atlantic city, one sees that it is not cats who are dirty, but we humans. sadly, more and more homeless people are choosing to sleep under the jersey shore boardwalks, even in winter, rather than go to a homeless shelter. people have always slept under atlantic city boardwalks, and since the advent of casinos, more and more atlantic city has become a place which "caters to losers." i've been living on this barrier island (absecon island) with atlantic city at the north end, and three small suburban beach towns, ventnor, margate, and longport, to the south, sharing the island, for over 15 years. it is the closest beach and ocean to philadelphia, where i was born and raised, and my parents used to bring me here as a child. i sold the old row house in the Feltonville section of Philadelphia my grandfather built, and where i grew up, and to where I retreated for almost a decade after my parents' deaths in the 1980's. it had by then become one of philadelphia's most "troubled" neighborhoods, though not a hard-core ghetto, just the usual working-class/lower middle-class place plagued for the past 25 years with steeet crime, graffiti even on trees, drive-by shootings, and all the trauma of inner city life. eventually, i moved to margate, buying a small one bedroom condo apartment. now i have to sell that as well and live frugally somewhere for the duration since my funds are disappearing, like so many others in America. the 1944 hurricane wiped out the boardwalk in margate and longport, and the decision was not to rebuild, so the many miles of boardwalk now extend from the inlet at the northern tip of the island down through atlantic city and ventnor. pressured by pork-barrel interests, the municipalities chose to allow the often incompetent "army core of engineers" to build artificial sand dunes between the boardwalk and the ocean in atlantic city and in ventnor in order to protect the casino interests (initially the casino executives wanted to tear down the entire boardwalk so as to more effectively keep people inside) and the multi-million-dollar beachfront homes. now the dunes block the views of ocean from the boardwalk while reducing ocean breezes, and providing, some have said, a home for rats (certainly for rubbish). most people downbeach from atlantic city are quite well-off: doctors, lawyers, dentists, entrepreneurs and ceo's, investment counselors and bankers, and who knows what. but you can still see the signs of hard times everywhere. the atlantic city violent crime endemic to the u.s., businesses closing down, property values diminishing, workers laid off, etc. most all previous mayors of atlantic city over the past 50 years or so have been indicted upon or even before leaving office, and some have served time in prison, so i would venture to say atlantic city is one of america's most corruption-ridden cities. (of course, in current tv programs extolling new jersey's crass subculture, we lap up the romanticization of crime and criminals and even the lack of signs of intelligent life in general.) the casinos only made it worse. corzine was the governor before christie. so far he has managed to avoid prison while accumulating his fortune over the years as former head of Goldman-Sachs and buying his way into the senate and governorship. the current governor, who has brought back deer culls and bear culls and the cull of wild birds in the local wetlands sanctuary (Forsythe wildlife refuge - a migration route safe stopover for thousands of birds (for thusands of years) flying south for the winter and returning in the spring) is, like most all politicians, a great friend to the very wealthy, and to hunters. on a personal level, he is the most obese politico since Taft, and i reckon he is bound to spontaneously combust someday, like the character named Krook in Dickens' Bleak House. once, when queried about his weight when so many on the planet are starving, he responded by saying people who work at IHOP or McDonalds, etc., have to have jobs and eat too. if one takes a hard look at new jersey's cities, like camden and others (even the state capitol, trenton), one sees the results of the total disgrace to governance brought about by christie and his predecessors. so obviously, animals and animal rights, are not exactly anyone's priority - except for the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in the Brigantine area of south jersey. the first cause i ever donated any money to, in a beginning attempt 45 years ago, to help stop the slaughter of baby seals in canada, still continues as cruel and unjustified murder. on the high seas, Sea Shepherd is more than worthy of our support, if you have an interest in these things. Sea Shepherd and not Greenpeace, is now most effective in trying to stop whale-hunting and other illegal activities. the Japanese are probably the worst offenders, especially in their shark-hunting, cutting off the fins of the shark and tossing them back in the ocean to die horrific deaths so they can swill their shark-fin soup. we kill millions of sharks every year, usually in this manner. oceans are often called "shark-infested" as if the sea were not their natural home. not to mention the concentration camps/extermination camps for turkeys and other creatures we gobble up. PETA is in my opinion the best large activist organization in support of the non-human life with which we share the planet. but the slaughter of rare animals just goes on, from Ohio to Africa (where poaching is unabated, the rhino being hunted to extinction for the supposed medicinal value of its horn, exported primarily to china and southeast asia). natural habitat is destroyed so that developers and their sponsors (as human advocates of Mammon are called) can construct more and more houses and golf-courses and gated communties primarily for the mega-rich. well, Alley-Cat Allies is a small (though now national) animal protection group doing what they can for the cat population in atlantic city. the number of animals being put-down in overcrowded and underfunded animal shelters is sickening. i'm not an eco-warrior, not even, i must shamefacedly admit, a vegetarian (though i must say it would be nice to have at least one vegetarian restaurant on this barrier island; there's not even one in all of atlantic county). some of new jersey's boardwalks are constructed with amazon rainforest wood, although this practice was in-part stopped by the persistence and hard work of local activists here, pointing out not simply other alternatives to amazon wood but noting how so-called civic leaders were lining their pockets with these import deals while causing not just grief, but contributing to the many murders of amazonian tribespeople by the logging industry there and their hitmen. i suppose i have pretty much given up on people as the years pass.... however, "something further may follow of this masquerade".....