A Charity Case: Random Thoughts on the Elephant in the Room

On The General Malaise

Nobody wants to be a charity case. I certainly didn't. As opposed to having lost my job in America, I was returning from a prolonged economic crisis overseas to see if I could restart a career stalled by America's bumbling with the Axis of Evil, an ill-conceived foreign policy concept that essentially created three new reasons for three new wars but did nothing except kill business for American companies overseas after 9-11, mine included. I had a company in South Korea, not an Axis country, but all the same, saw business grind to a halt with simply the name Korea being tainted for the then foreseeable future. And so I worked tirelessly to rebound from that over the next ten years. But it didn't work. So I came home. And that hasn't worked either. Yet.

USA: #1 in poverty

But I could never have seen the disaster that would be America on my return. The omnipresence of a repressive police state, the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York spreading country, and indeed worldwide, within weeks of my return. The general depression of the place - Obama all but sold out to the banksters and poverty rapidly rising all across the country with nary a word about it in the national debate - THAT elephant in the room. That 99%. In the graph here, America is #1. #1 in relative poverty worldwide (and Japan or Korea don't even make the list - or anywhere is Asia for that matter) pointing to income disparity being our problem and the difference between collectivist, socialist, and individualistic, capitalist, societies.)

And this week's political distraction being Rush Limbaugh calling a college student a 'slut' as the G8 conference  is quietly moved from Chicago to Camp David under the threat that Chicago could gain it's 1968 notoriety back again with mass protests against both the G8 and NATO summits being held in the city at the same time. Too bad. I hope people hit the streets anyway. It's needed. More needed than ever.

On Being an Educational Tool

I continue to have mixed feelings over this blog being used as a reference for homeless studies (see sidebar above) as I come to see what has become described by some as The Homeless Industrial Complex: "those organizations (who) rely on the continuation of the homeless problem for their own survival; if the homeless problem goes away, so do the donations and grants. The homeless problem will remain intractable until the homeless-industrial complex which sustains it is broken." 

As this blog is used by one arm of Columbia University for research, another, the Columbia Center for the Prevention of Homelessness Studies (CHPS) sites no less than fifty (yes, 50) Ph.D.s proffering to address the homeless issue as well. Now one has to ask themselves, didn't the boss ever come in one morning and give the entire staff a gigantic ass chewing over the dismal state of the numbers? "Look goddamit, we're spending ooddles of grant monies and our work has proved to be completely and totally ineffective! You're all fired!" No. Of course not - because if the boss did that, they might be out on the street as well. And so the system keeps feeding itself. 

For the record, I've contacted CHPS and offered my services as a researcher but have yet to receive any response. Why is it that I imagine a room full of academics pecking away at computers and looking up and saying (in unison), "A real homeless guy, working here? Nah, that wouldn't work".

On The Phone Thing

There is some light at the end of the tunnel here. With a few more expected donations by the end of the week, I should have a phone by the following week. If you can help, please do. I still need to pay the service fee each month of at least $50.

On Work

By the end of this month I will have made nearly $550 honest, writing website copy, beginning a soon to be announced book with a friend and participating in a homeless research study for NYU. But that's a far cry away from being called a living wage, let alone paying rent. Hopefully the phone will take away yet one more invisible wall and get me back on the track to some real work. But to do that means extracting some miniscule percentage from that well entrenched 1%. Better wish me some luck on that. I hear they're holed up at Camp David these days...

A Homeless Blogger In NYC Occupies Wall Street

Brush with the law

Do I protest the system that both messed me up and partially supports me? One answer: "Yes". It's the only sensible thing to do. The only way to contribute to ending a system that gives back very little to those who support it - those 99% who don't share the wealth of the 1% who control it. I saw a sign at the protest recently  that said, "The System's Not Broken. It Was Built This Way" - and that's a sorry damned comment on the whole mess, because it might be true. And so in whatever hours I can, on nights and weekends, I Occupy Wall Street, along with thousands of others, to effect the change we elected, but didn't get. Unfortunately, the first thing Obama did was bail out the banks - while the rest of America, the tax base, was left hanging. Obama, for whatever we thought we bought, sold us out. And that's sad again because I supported him, as did much of the world.

McLuhan lives!

And so I paint. In my teens I taught myself to paint signs, because I loved typography and eventually ended up working as a professional sign painter to pay for college. It was a good job, much better for me than working at Mickey D's, and the solitude of the work was always peaceful for me. It is again. I haven't lettered in 35 years. I had forgotten the meditation it provided - to think of something, to design it in my head, and then to put it to surface. The end result is never the work itself. It's the reaction it gets from others. And that feeds both the artist and the viewer. Lovely. The work is all freehand and done from a scratchy ball pen thumbnail. Making it bigger is the actual art. The sign you see says, "The Medium Is Our Message". It is paraphrased from a Marshall McLuhan expression. In this case, I meant it to describe what the demonstration in Zuccotti park is all about. About the idea of expressing ideas by assembling, and creating mass communication (The business I ended up in.). The medium is the gathering and the signs and the message is simply whatever people take from it. Not a list of demands, not a manifesto, not a protest - but a gathering together to exercise the rights of our first amendment. That's the message.

If the painting looks better at the start than it does at the finish, that's because it was painted three times. Once on Friday evening. Then again on Saturday, because the tempera paint was washed away by the rain overnight. Then again on Sunday, because it was washed away a second time. Finally on Sunday, I switched to acrylic paint that could survive the rain. For that, I had to use colours that were less brilliant, but stable after drying. It went from graphic design to street art for all the repaints, and somehow, it works that way. Maybe I could get a job being a signpainter again - if this homeless writer thing doesn't work out :)

Make Jobs, Not War!

What Obama's speech should have said: "Good evening. To get American working again, we must cut our massive war budget and find better ways to spend that money. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."