The guy in the straw hat brought some food over to the guys at the table in one of the pavilions by the beach in Waikiki. Giving food to people who need it is a good thing to do. I’ve been both beneficiary and benefactor in that situation, but it’s only necessary because we have a sieve-like social welfare system that can neither prevent nor end homelessness and food insecurity.
(The pavilions are now surrounded by metal fencing to keep homeless people, and incidentally everyone else, out.)
This story in the LA Times, about students who raised money to buy a car, insurance, and gas for a favorite teacher who faced a four-hour round trip daily commute on public transportation, reminded me of that photo.
The teacher, Julio Castro, has an undergraduate degree in molecular cell and developmental biology. He teaches math at a private school in LA, but lives some 40 miles outside the city where housing is more affordable.
The starting salary for teachers in LA public schools is $48,000, and private schools often pay less than public ones.
Contrast that with the $70,000 salary Los Angeles police department recruits get while attending the police academy, along with as much as $24,000 annually in housing assistance for two years.
(Maybe we should arm all our teachers; seems to pay a lot better, and could be helpful in contract negotiations.)
These are choices: not housing people who haven’t a place to live, not paying teachers as much as cops, not ending poverty by giving people money—the latter of which was loudly demonstrated, in the breach, when the enhanced child tax credit program was killed, to work like a charm.
(Joe Manchin deserves a special fuck you for that, and for the general contempt he aims at the poor.)
Is it still the case that news shows on the TV always end with a human interest story? Maybe a little girl opening a lemonade stand to help mom pay the rent, or to buy a decent prosthetic leg for a poor but honest neighbor whose insurance wouldn’t cover it?
And do news readers say “This is great, but it’s also grotesque. Why does anyone have to do this?” Do you suppose they know they’re propagandizing against a healthy social order? Would it be worse if they know, or if they don’t?
Children and others who band together to provide people with necessities ought to be applauded, and the people they help oughtn’t be in need of it. The churches who feed homeless people on site and don’t proselytize with the food ought to be applauded, and no one ought to need them.
Families oughtn’t be living in cars. Nobody ought to be going without health care.
And no one should be working three jobs to survive.
Anyone over the age of 40 and of a certain political bent will likely recall the incident in which George W. Bush congratulated a woman who told him that she had to work those three jobs—“That is fantastic,” he said—and everyone applauded.
Bush also said that her plight was “uniquely American,” which is true enough for people working inside the formal economy of a wealthy nation. In fact it’s true for most of the horrible shit that happens to people in this country, the shit they have to do to get by or suffer when they don’t, at least in degree if not in kind.
A little story: One night in Santa Monica, on an Ocean Avenue bus bench after the Santa Monica buses had shut down for the night, I was chatting with a homeless woman of my acquaintance, killing time before retiring to our respective spots, when a pair of obviously merry Norwegian (it turned out) guys approached and started chatting with us.
(Their English was excellent.)
I don’t remember how the subject arose, but they asked the woman where she lived, and she explained her situation. They were visibly shocked, and interrogated us for a few minutes about how this could happen, and then they offered to put her up in their hotel for a night, and off they went.
We ran into one another a week or so later on the steps of the Shangri-La hotel (then closed for renovation).
I was relieved of feeling guilty because I hadn’t thought to follow them to make sure she was okay. She said they’d put her up at the Hilton until they left, which was three nights, and they’d told her to put her food tab on her room, and gave her a couple hundred before they checked out, part of which she used to stay in a hostel for another two nights.
That was charity, and it was marvelous, and it oughtn’t have been necessary. (And it surely wouldn’t have happened if she didn’t look relatively together and had been carrying her life in a shopping cart instead of her two suitcases, but, still.) It’s a matter of choices, and Norwegians have chosen to do their best to eliminate homelessness, and they have learned to be shocked at it.
Sometimes charity, or philanthropy, is necessary because the best-intentioned government will lumber now and again, but it should always be aimed at intermediacy, and charitable firms, foundations and individuals should be lobbying the government to put them out of business.
We could make the bad stuff all go away, or most of it anyway. I think we need to redefine moderation.
(Contributors to this post include The Cholla’s Anthropocene; Art Pepper’s The Art of the Ballad; The Trogg’s and R.E.M.’s Athens Andover; the Chris Robinson Brotherhood’s Betty’s Self-Rising Southern Blends, Vol. 3; Big Something’s Truth Serum; and North Mississippi All Stars & Anders Osborne’s Freedom and Dreams. Put your music recommendations in the comments.)
I teach a class in Environmental Science. At the end of today’s lecture, I made the point that everything, from plastic in the water, all the way to climate change, was fixable with the technology we have now, without everyone having to live in huts. Then I put up my notes and walked out of the classroom, secure in the knowledge that nothing will ever be fixed.
Same deal with what you’re talking about.
Cures are there - enough of us just gotta find the handles.