What the Most Powerful Country in the World Cannot Afford?

Outside the box

Technically, the United States is not the wealthiest country in the world per-capita. Those honours go to places like Luxembourg and a few oil-rich monarchies - but amongst the G20 we are the leader, most powerful, most influential and most envied. So imagine my surprise at OWS this week when a young man from Burma, otherwise know as Myanmar, and the 163rd poorest country on the planet according to the IMF, asked me, "why the most powerful country in the world had so many homeless people?" (Over 1.5 million people used a shelter last year - that's one in every 200 Americans.) I was dumbfounded. I had no answer. But it told me again why I am participating in the Occupy movement. Something is drastically wrong in America when Madoff clones control our national finance and we can't pay for society's basic needs. Photographer Eliud Martinez tells the OWS story powerfully here through black and white photography.

But this week I had another series of graphics tell me what we can't afford. It got down to the itty bitty things that I need to conduct my job search in the city. Here are a few:

1) NYC cannot afford to fix the Metrocard sales machines at Park and 28th Street to downtown for four days, so I can't buy a ticket.

2) My government subcontracted Back to Work program can't afford to refill a printer cartridge all week for the printer we use to print our resumes so we have to go elsewhere and pay.

3) The shelter I live in at 30th St. can't afford to fix the conveyor belt that carries bags through the x-ray machine meaning that bags must be hand searched - thus increasing the opportunity that weapons can enter the facility.

4) The same shelter also cannot afford to fix the one elevator that works forcing many disabled men to walk up eight flights of stairs. I am lucky here, I can walk.

These are just a few small things I encountered this week that my country cannot afford. And if these indeed are true, then it seems that we cannot afford to be spending billions fighting wars and bailing out corrupt financial institutions any longer. Long live OWS. Long live the occupants.

Homeless 101.5: All in Good Humour

Jack Nicholson

Living in Bellevue, the crazy house - even as a re-purposed homeless shelter, is one thing but letting it drive you crazy is quite another.. So it pays to keep a sense of humour on oneself at all times. Having a good laugh can make a whole crappy day go away. Poof. Gone. And so I use an old Quentin’ Tarantino trick to remember the little things that happen that I might otherwise forget. I had heard once that when asked how he could write prison lingo film dialog that Tarantino said he had been thrown into the drunk tank once, and so he just wrote down everything all his cellmates said. If I wrote down everything my roommates said at Bellevue, I’d never be able to stop writing, so I just write down the memorable stuff. Here’s some:

 “Nah, it’ll just make me feel like a cop”, responds one guy to another on the elevator when asked if he wanted a free donut. 

The Back to Work program is a government program that is supposed to prepare people to re-enter the workforce after unemployment, but what it seems to excel at is in making people wait. For instance, at the subcontractor CEC (Career Educational Consultants) that I attend, after punching in on a clock, people must wait to sign into their class (yes, that's like punching in by hand a second time), this can take an hour or more because the hallway is just jammed – and there really is no class – just a room full of banged up old computers that people who have never used a computer before try to use. And after signing in there, you can sign up again on a clipboard to see your case worker or a job consultant. This could take an hour more, or two. And then there’s the line to get your Metrocard, the card used on buses and subways – a half hour at least. And so the place is always SRO with people waiting. 


Phone rings, lady waiting in the crowd answers and then responds: “I’m at the zoo”, she says. And this oddly, all becomes normal.

“I kissed a white girl in rehab” – Says a guy on 8^th avenue to his buddy as I walk by on the way to the soup kitchen for lunch.

The other day the library gave me a little tiny library card with a hole in it for my keychain. Funny, homeless people don’t have keychains, I thought.

Back at Bellevue a conversation ensues in the room in which the word ‘tomorrow’ was used twice by the same guy – and almost, as if on cue, Marvin and I break into a chorus from the musical Annie, “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya Tomorrow! You're always A day A way! ”, we sang in unrehearsed unison. It was friggin' hilarious.

"HA, HA, HA, Ha!", bellowed another roomie. "That's Belleview at its finest!".

So the other night at the Occupy camp was 'Kid's Night' - a night in which middle class parents brought their kids down to spend the night in a tent. Now, if that's not funny, I don't know what is. "Lookie Skip", those are hippies over there", said dad. "Just like grampa used to be".

The laughs never end around here. Wonder what Bloomberg had for dinner tonight?