Back in 1986, when I lived in Boston the first time, and after a condominium renovation had become endless and my wife had left me, and I had dropped out of night school, and getting laid off from my job seemed a definite possibility, I would walk around the city late at night handing my loose change to the men and women lining Arlington and Boylston near the park, or the doorways of Kenmore Square. I was hoping to buy some better luck I suppose, or maybe virtue to trade back later. God knows I needed a change.

You’ll say I should have saved my coin or bought a lottery ticket instead, because change was inevitable either way. I say, I went to bed feeling a little less sullied and a little more grateful for what I did have, and it’s rare that a small handful of quarters will buy you that.

This all comes to mind after meeting the guys a temp agency sent us to unload the moving van. After a last night in El Paso, in a La Quinta no less, though not one as delicious as north of Atlanta, we woke up early and made the final dash into Tucson to meet the moving van, arriving with 2 hours to spare, enough time just barely to call an agency and hire two guys to help us unload. At the end of the day, after 4 hours in triple digit temperatures, and a thorough soaking when a tiny little thunderstorm sidled over and spewed, these guys went home with $7/hour from the agency and a little extra I didn’t tell the agency about.

These guys sign in at the agency in the morning, arriving as early as possible to stand a better chance of a good place on the list, and then wait for the call. It’s marginally better than waiting on a street corner, something I remember from the years I lived in Los Angeles, but the agency gets half the money, and there’s still no assurance that the call will come. They are working, in any case, these two men, and they are poor. Strange to put a label ("poor") on two people that are no longer nameless or faceless. Strange and quite possibly insulting, categorizing, abstracting, sifting away their individuality.

That contrast between what little I can imagine of their life and what I know about my own, it gives a truly sordid “satisfaction”. Worse, it is based not on their real life, but on the life I imagine they have, a life I probably imagine in such a way as to maximize my own relief, that I am me and not them. Relief, not satisfaction.

Poverty and charity, the relationship between them, feels pretty simple. The emotions behind them suddenly feel very complicated.

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher

Levy says this on poverty in America, and the fact that large numbers of the poor are incarcerated in this country:
”And should we…conclude that [the US] has chosen to set up the penal state against that of the providential state, proposing a net of control that involves first police, then prison, as against a minimum income and guaranteed medical care? Of course not. I will not go so far as to say that. But that America is, just after Russia, the world champion of imprisonment is a fact. That it does not, however, actually have such a large number of major criminals incapable of rehabilitation into society is another fact. And that its prisons are participating in this way in a global system of producing and concealing, manufacturing and then condemning to invisibility, a population of the absolute poor, excluded from the space of the polis, who are turning into zombies, troglodytes-a physician would say “foreign bodies”-in a society that finds here the insurmountable defect in its armor and its image-that is a third fact, and one that is not the smallest result of my investigation”. (Levy, p245)

written by  roel krabbendam on July 30, 2007 from Tucson, United States
from the travel blog: Spare Change
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It is, I suppose, their privilege, but it strikes me as a foretaste of oblivion. Levy visited Sun City near Phoenix and wrote this:

“The problem, in short, is that all this implies a profound break with the very tradition of civic mindedness and civility-I won’t even say of compassion-that was responsible, and continues to be responsible, for this country’s greatness. And this experiment in privatizing a public space at the expense of a community cannot fail to create a terrible precedent…if we ratify the principle of this gilded ghetto based on membership in a certain age and income bracket, then by what right can we tomorrow prevent the development of cities forbidden to the old?...In whose name can we resist the definitive balkanization of American space that could well result? (Levy, p 129)

“…I leave Sun City with a feeling of unease, no longer knowing if you come here to save or to damn yourself, to banish death or savor a foretaste of it”. (Levy, p130)

Of course, the Balkanization of American space is an old story. North of Atlanta, the experience of the poor black in New Orleans, now this “retirement community”…all products of fear or preference or probably both. This distancing from the “Other” leaves me profoundly conflicted. Were these insular communities active in the production of culture: unique, rich and interesting lives contributing to some larger communal and inclusive vision, then it would scare me less. New Orleans may be the exception, but I do not think that this is what is going on.

Personally, for now because who knows what I'll feel like at 80, I choose the “Other”. I choose variety. I choose difference and conflict and friction, the new. I choose a challenge. I choose dialectic and synthesis without end, each new result juxtaposed with each new opposite and engaged in discovering a new synthesis. I choose change.

I will admit to waking up now with the unsettling knowledge that we have lost our moorings. It is a peculiar vertigo, if I may borrow one last thought from Levy. If it takes some time to figure out this new life however, if we encounter boredom and frustration and indifference and feelings of unease, if sometimes we look at each other and ask “what the hell were we thinking”?, at least we will know this: we are alive, we are engaged in the world, we are trying something new and we are actively searching and ultimately, we will find our way. I am sure of it.

written by  roel krabbendam on July 30, 2007 from Tucson, United States
from the travel blog: Spare Change
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