Let’s Talk of Patience to the Afflicted

by Jim Washburn

It’s windy tonight, with cold gusts that cut right through three layers of clothes, not to mention slugging pinecones right out of the trees. Our dog gets a curtailed walk.

Even back inside, there’s the flumph of the wind rolling against the walls, puffing in through the gaps in our non-insulated, non-weatherproofed abode. Those in more stable homes probably even scarcely notice there’s a wind blowing. “Oh, it’s windy,” then back to the TV, sex on the butcher block, Parcheesi or whatever it is stable folks do.

Me, I’m thinking still about Ontario’s tent city, where they almost certainly aren’t saying, “Oh, it’s windy,” and commencing to the butcher block. The wind is getting right up into their mess non-stop all night: lean-tos now leaning-from; tarps flying off to tarp heaven; the huddled masses stumbling in the dust with tent stakes and duct tape trying to hold what-all together, or just trying to pull the blanket tight in hopes the wind might give up and go bother someone else. This after the pounding rain they had the week before. Next up: locusts.

At least Ontario’s letting people sleep in that pathetic field, for now, and providing some services. But you can’t help but wonder about our priorities as a people when hundreds of folks are sleeping with only a few microns of nylon tenting keeping them from the dirt, rain and wind, while all around are acres of untenanted business parks, shopfronts and light industrial buildings where the roofs, floors and walls are keeping a vast realm of empty space warm and dry.

Why not have a program to let the homeless sleep in these uninhabited habitats until paying customers come along? Sure there are liability issues, and, yes, it may be harder for leasing agents if they’re trying to show a property while Hobo Joe is taking a florid dump in the foyer. But, Jesus, Christ, where there’s a will there’s a way. If we can spend trillions sharing democracy’s explosive potential with the Iraqis, you would think we could do a little more for the old folks trudging our streets.

chain chain chain ... chain of fools

I love the Republican presidential candidates attacking John Edwards for “trying to divide the nation” with his claim that there are two Americas. There may be no better proof of our bisected nation than the fact that the only people who don’t see how obvious the divide is are the ones all living to one side of it.

To people with security, what’s a little wind? It barely warrants notice. To people without security, that wind is tearing what little they have from their grasp.

I am phenomenally better off than the folks eking it out on that Ontario waste, but I know which of the Americas I’m living in. I had a meeting this week with some successful folks I’m doing a project with. Nice guys, and to them we’ve been on a year-long adventure of continually revising and redefining the project—between their trips to the world’s beauty spots—and who cares when it might pay off? Meanwhile, I’m sitting at our most recent meeting with two aching holes in my back where skin cancers I can’t even pronounce have been removed, wondering where in hell I’m going to get the money to pay for the deeper excisions the biopsies say are required. At minimum, this is going to cost $4000, and the only health insurance my wife and I have been able to afford or qualify for—at some $5 grand a year—carries a $5000-per-person annual deductible, after which we’d still have to pony up 20% of whatever bills may pile up. Meanwhile, the car’s making ominous noises, the cost of everything keeps climbing and my profession, journalism, is teeming with laid-off schlubs scrabbling for work.

Congressfolk can talk about the healthcare “crisis” and the numerous other crises laid upon working people, but, when it comes down to it, crisis is just a word to them. How else could Joe Biden—generally a decent guy as Senators go—have voted for the Bush-and-industry-backed bankruptcy bill of 2005? Touted as a way of stopping credit card cheats from raising costs for all of us, the truth is that far more defaulters are people who’ve been wiped out by medical emergencies, who now have no remedy from being dunned into the grave for having had the bad sense to get sick. That’s one less blanket between most Americans and the howling wind.

“It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,” William Blake wrote in 1797, “It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun, And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn, It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted, To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer, To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season, When the red blood is filled with wine and with the marrow of lambs.” You go, Billy.

Those who don’t buy the two Americas argument claim it’s just playing on people’s envy and victim mentality. Instead, it should be a source of inspiration when Norm Newport’s pimped-out Humvee splatters you with mud, since that could be you behind the wheel if only you’d show some gumption and put the dividends from your trust fund into one of Mitt Romney’s offshore tax-haven accounts.

Norm’s wheels

The wine and mutton have been flowing upward to the richest Americans at a historic rate, says a study issued last December by the Congressional Budget Office. Ever since Reagan, the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer at an accelerated pace. In the Bush years, it’s become a rout, where just the increase in wealth accruing to the nation’s wealthiest one percent is 37 percent greater than the total income going to the poorest 20 percent. Here’s some more: It takes the total amount of money earned by 166 million struggling Americans to equal the amount going to the richest three million. Incomes for the richest one percent have gone up 42.6 percent, averaging $465,700 per household, while incomes rose 1.3 percent for the poorest fifth of the population, some $200. Whatever would the rich have done without those tax cuts?

The velvet rope that separates the privileged from the rest of us has been extending ever more into government, where we were once supposed to all be equal. When Bush decreed that citizens now need a passport to travel to Canada and Mexico, any other administration would have anticipated the flood of passport requests it would cause. Instead, there were suddenly waits of six months or more for a passport, bad news if you’re traveling in six weeks. The remedy? Those who could afford it could pay for special expedited treatment. The ineffectual showbiz of airport security slowing you down? No problem, just pay up to be in the “Registered Traveler” program, and you don’t have to queue up with the mere citizens. In recent years, the LA Times has done stories on how there’s essentially a separate court system set up for the convenience of the rich.

Is it surprising that there are plans to open up our freeway’s carpool lanes—now that the extra millions have been spent on those lofting inter-freeway connectors—to anyone who wants to pay to drive in them? I was predicting just that in columns ten years ago, positing that we’d basically have a system of bunk freeways, with the rich getting the top bunk. Ignore that I also predicted log flume rides would become the prevalent form of mass transportation and I think you’ll agree I was pretty prescient.

Our country—once blessed with the concept that all men are equal under the law—is with each passing day looking more like a third-world oligarchy. Back in the 1980s, whenever anyone tried to raise the specter of the growing divide between rich and poor, Ronald Reagan would say something to the effect of, “There they go again, trying to instigate class warfare.” Well look around, folks. It was a war. It’s over. They won.

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