This is the second in a series of essays inspired by a comment from a fellow Kossack who said, in response to a flippant potshot posted in one of my late-night bouts of cantankerousness,
I hope you can write about those things you are angry about, specifically.
As I got to thinking about the specifics, I realized I was so pissed about so many things that I had to make a list. In the first installment, entitled Pissed, I talked about how "hate" came to rank number one on my "Fuckit-List". Now I'm not so sure because indifference takes a close second to hate in my book, and in fact might have to be the number one thing that pisses me off. So maybe my FuckIt-List is going to have to be horizontal rather than vertical--a series, not a ladder.
Indifference. In 1986, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wieselfamously stated thatThe opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
Less famously, but perhaps more pertinently, Wiesel elaborated further on the Perils of Indifference in a speech at the White House in 1999, where he said:
Indifference to evil is the enemy of god, for indifference is the enemy of everything that exalts the honor of man. We fight indifference through education; we diminish it through compassion. The most efficient remedy? Memory.
To remember means to recognize a time other than the present; to remember means to acknowledge the possibility of a dialogue. In recalling an event, I provoke its rebirth in me. In evoking a face, I place myself in relationship to it. In remembering a landscape, I oppose it to the walls that imprison me. The memory of an ancient joy or defeat is proof that nothing is definitive, nor is it irrevocable. To live through a catastrophe is bad; to forget it is worse.
Memory. Wiesel's statements fly in the face of America's "don't worry be happy"- and "oh will you get over it already"- approach to just about everything. Move On. Accentuate the positive. Obliterate the negative. I've never been able to do that, and, while I certainly don't wish to place the trials and travails of my own small life on a par with the great catastrophes of our past, present and future, I live with the scars of poverty and neglect inflicted in early childhood--seems like lifetimes ago, but the agonies and ironies linger, and it's a point I've often tried in vain to make to people of prosperity in this country who seem to have little or no understanding for the perils of indifference to the plight/s of people of poverty. No amount of money can wash these memories away. And I resent the attempts to make it so.
I cannot shake the memory of my first encounter with this indifference. I was 6. The bus driver had dropped me off from the Head Start program one late August afternoon: I collapsed in fever before reaching the front door to the house. My mother didn't notice. She was too busy anesthetizing herself with whiskey and KOOL 100s inside. I'm not sure how long I lay there before my grandmother came along and found me. I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and put on ice to cool the fever of 106. Diagnosis: double pneumonia. For the duration of my 2-week stay in the hospital, my mother visited me once. Grandmother came whenever she could, which wasn't often. The hospital--in reality probably not much more than a mile or two from the tarpaper shack we lived in next to the railroad tracks--might as well have been situated on Alcatrez Island for a family with no money for cab fare in a small midwestern town with no public transportation, and no friends or family who owned a vehicle. Cars were what rich people had: what we had, or didn't have, was cab fare. Period.
In my two-week absence, the house we'd been renting was condemned by the city, and I came "home" to a tenement apartment located just on the other side of the same railroad track. It was fall. My mother was drunk. All day, every day. With the possible exception of the first of the month, when she cabbed it down to the AFDC to pick up commodities and food stamps. Toward the end of the month, pickings were mostly slim, but the Mexican lady across the street always managed to fill our bellies on home-made tortillas and peanut butter. There weren't many "minorities" in that white bread town. A smattering of Latinos, all of whom were my neighbors. And my friends. Like Henry. Henry Gomez. And his little brother whose name I have forgotten but whose fate is dinted indelibly on my mind and inextricably tied to the collective indifference on the part of people of prosperity that pisses me off to this day.
I wasn't allowed to go play in the street upon my return from the hospital, and TVs, like cars, were the little luxuries of the rich. We didn't have one. So I spent my afternoons at the window watching the goings-on below. The tenement was situated on a corner and housed a downstairs bar whose entrance faced a busy street that intersected at an odd diagonal angle to the narrow north-south street where our side entrance was located. We didn't even consider our street a "street" because there was so little traffic on it. No one living on that street owned a car. The street, like the railroad tracks and the Mexicans' dirt patch of a yard, was our playground. One day while looking out the window at the children playing below, I watched as a late-model Chrysler came cruising through, hit Henry Gomez's brother and sent him sailing to the other side where he landed with a thud in his mother's dirt-patch garden. Maybe the driver of the car never knew he hit the kid. I don't know. What I do know is that he barely slowed to a stop at the intersection before he hit the gas and headed southeast down Calumet Drive.
Henry's brother never got up again. And in this way, he's lived on in my memory as a monument to that driver's indifference. The neighborhood I live in now is not unlike the graveyard where the memory of Henry Gomez's little brother lies buried in my mind: as I write, I'm looking out the window of my three-story home and can see the dim profile of freight train picking its way along the tracks, just far enough in the distance to not annoy. The rumble of its wheels is comforting to me. But that's because I've got a little more house under my seat now. Shiny high-efficiency stainless steel in the kitchen downstairs, gleaming granite, a polished hardwood expanse where two cats pad comfortably to and fro. I don't mind that the jerking motion of the train sometimes sets the Rosenthal and Goebel porcelain figurines to rattling behind the glass panes of the barrister bookcases lined with the tomes of advanced degrees: BA, MA, PhD. My mother never lived to see me get them, and she--like most of my neighbors--couldn't even really comprehend what they mean. "Hey Ma, I got a PhD!" I can hear it echo from the grave, "PhD? Is that curable?" No, Ma. Once you've got it, you're stuck with it for life." I have tried to fight indifference through education. But it's a battle I fear I've lost.
My Puerto Rican neighbors to the east, with their three-car garage, their glistening red Ford Excursion, their fully finished basement where we sometimes play Wii on the 60-inch flat screen TV, and my Nation of Islam neighbors to the west with their immaculately landscaped double lot and a coach house out back where the kids sometimes stay aren't the ones who need educating. We know that we are "the rich people"--we sometimes joke about it: our three homes comprise the "95th Street Gated Community." Our histories have equipped us with the compassion required to diminish indifference. We are careful to stop, look, and listen as we enter and exit the alley where the Latino children play with the Black. We look the other way at the piles of trash out back behind the tenement at the end of the street. And we give what we can. We work in fields that serve the community. With the winds of poverty at our backs, we are forever mindful of the need to help give a leg up. This history of poverty does not make us saints, it doesn't make us better people. It just means that we cannot and do not forget.
OK. So that was then, this is now, and I know where this is probably going. WAIT! STOP! WTF?! How can you extrapolate collective indifference from these few individual experiences? Henry Gomez's brother's murderer was just a creep. Dime a dozen, the folks who simply don't give a fuck. That's the problem: they are a dime a dozen. But I know for a fact that their numbers have been increasing exponentially in the decades since the advent of the "Ketchup-Is-A-Vegetable"-generation, the Reagan-Era, when greed became a "traditional family value."
If there's one incident from our not-too-distant past that signaled for me my defeat in the fight to diminish indifference it was this country's response Katrina. Nope. I wasn't there. Like so many of us, I sat and watched Anderson Cooper lose his cookies on TV. But the event changed my relationship to this country. It forever altered my opinion of its people. Because whatever we did, it was not enough. We sat and watched it go down. Lots of hand-wringing, and a generous outpouring of money and support, to be sure.
What we didn't do is stand up and say "WE'RE MAD AS HELL AND WE AREN'T GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE." We should have been pissed. Pissed enough to DO something. Pissed enough to walk off the job. Pissed enough to move. Our government's response to Katrina was nothing short of criminal. And sure, we as a people debated it, condemned it, criticized it. But what did we do about it? And why didn't we do more?
I remember walking around in a daze, trying to talk to people about it: what are we going to DO? Shrug. Dunno. Blank stare. Were we paralyzed by indifference or sheer helplessness? I don't know, yet I cannot help but think that if the people we were watching on those television sets had been people of prosperity, not people of poverty, we'd have done more. If this had been Wall Street, or Hollywood, even if it had been Main Street (maybe especially then), we'd have been pissed enough hit the streets because our own memories, our own images of ourselves in similar situations would have inspired us to act. But we didn't. And I can't help but believe this is because too many of have no memory of poverty to draw on. No memory to compel us to demand remedy. We couldn't see ourselves in them. We just saw them as "those people." Those poor people down there in Louisiana.
They say the best way to learn about your own country is to leave it. Go somewhere else and see how other people live, so another contrasting memory kept coming to mind as I walked our conspicuously empty post-Katrina streets.
I did that. I left this country in 1984 to study, later to live and work in Germany. I was in Germany on Wednesday, January 16, 1991, and what stands out in my mind is not so much what the American government did, but what the German people did. It's the spontaneity of their actions that still strikes me, and stands in stark contrast to Americans' response to Katrina. When I first got the news about the airstrikes on Baghdad, I got up from my chair and went out in the street to protest. I wasn't alone. People began streaming into the streets. There was no organized protest. No one had to tell us to do this. There were no permits issued, no portapotties installed, and we did not give a flying fuck about whether we were "allowed" to do this, about whether we'd get arrested for it, get fired for walking off the job. We were compelled to ACT. Immediately and spontaneously. Regardless of consequence, regardless of effect. And obviously, our efforts had little effect.
I was joined on the street by hundreds, then thousands, all of us marching in outrage toward the city center, where we converged from every direction. And the same thing happened in almost every major city in Germany. I don't want to make the Germans out to be saints, certainly not, and for all I know, the same thing happened here in response to the first Gulf war. But it did not happen in response to Katrina. I'm fairly certain that it was partly the collective memory of war on one's own soil that compelled the Germans to hit the streets that day. The scars of war still pock the walls and streets of German cities. Berlin's Gedächtniskirche is just one example. The Germans remembered.
So I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about all of it. Maybe memory's got nothing to do with it. Maybe it really is less about indifference and more about helplessness. Or simple self-preservation. But I'm pissed. I'm still pissed about Katrina. And part of what pisses me off is that the pattern keeps repeating itself, albeit on a smaller scale, but with the same "shrug, oops, oh well response, whattyagonnado". Atlanta, August 12, 2010. September 1, 2010, Long lines greet flood assistance centers in Chicago. And still, as Americans, we turn our attention to Pakistan. Our heartstrings are struck by the fate of starving children in Africa. And we do what we can to help, while turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the poverty in our own back yards.
And yes, I freely concede that I may have taken the plunge into incoherence here: but the point I have tried to make and my thesis is that, because too many of us have removed ourselves from the "pockets" (cough, cough) of poverty in our midst, we have inured ourselves to it. Perhaps we are numbed by it. Maybe it's too close to home precisely because on some level, we know it is here, and it is our problem, not someone else's. In any case, we do seem indifferent to it. Because poverty in America is not in "our" neighborhoods. It's in the "slums" of Atlanta. Chicago. New Orleans. It's on some desolate, little-traveled street we happen to have erred onto. And what's that got to do with us? With our lives? Our memories of who we are, who we have been and who we have become?
At any rate. It pisses me off. And it will continue to piss me off until it is fixed. If our government can't fix it, then it's our job to do so.
So I remain. Perennially and probably permanently PISSED.