99% covers a vast range of incomes and situations. Trust does not come easy; in a world where class consciousness is quashed - what hope has trans-classism? More than you might think. More than I thought when I started writing this.
I started this as an exploration in how to overcome fundamental distrust.
In a nutshell: Draw closer, not farther apart.
Act: together.
Talk: together.
And Occupy nothing at all, before you Occupy Each Other's Hearts.
It's important.
They left an hour ago, beautiful tele-connected angels all, half in this world of flesh and carbon, half in the realm of pixels and silicon. And that is only for the time they were among us; by now they are flying to new lost souls, as angels do.
I look around the concrete-floored room; we served soup and sandwiches and powdered iced tea to three hundred yearning, desperate people; we had to shut the doors on three hundred others. A shoving match broke out between the huge guard, an off-duty policeman, and a man with two large-eyed children crouched behind the cement block corner of the entranceway to the shelter.
The angels, who see all, uploaded Twitpics and Facebook comments in real time. One even carried on a live blog on an iPad.
All told, it’s amazing there isn’t more blood on the floor these days; times are desperate; the lone cop, volunteering his time for this sadly-essential security function, relies on his authority and more than his sidearm and his imposing presence. It’s a microcosm of the 99% thing; here, our soup and sandwiches make us the 1%.
Worth saying again: Given what is going on elsewhere in the city – all of the cities, really – it’s amazing there isn’t more blood on the floor these days. People are angry. Regard for authorities is coming down with every club that comes down.
The angels nod as I tell them this; it makes great copy and improved site traffic. One smiles and brags: “I’ve got 10,000 followers now.” The other celestials congratulate her.
They live half in the silicon world, half in the carbon. And they look good doing it, too –beautiful in the way that only the young (or the well- but not excessively-fed) can be. We are serving store-bought bologna sandwiches, with packet of donated condiments and servings of chicken broth prepared from home-made stock by a nearby UU congregation. The angels nod approvingly that a properly progressive agency is involved, though – as angels do – one casts an aspersion against “weak-tea for weenies that can’t go cold turkey on their myth addiction”.
One of the UU volunteers moves from the line and makes to protest; there is a brief spike in disapproving noises from the line waiting to be serve.
I put up a hand. “It is not the responsibility of the angels show their best; that’s our job tonight.” The woman glares at the smirking angel, puts on a tight smile, adjusts her glasses and returns to filling cups with ice and Lipton powdered tea.
“So, how do these people feel about the Occupy movement?” One of the angels, a young-seeming man with a shaved head and dark glasses, asks. He wears a shiny leather jacket – not plastic or glossed, just oiled, with all the signs of impeccable care and little exposure to wear and tear.
I blink. “They’re right there. Ask them.”
A middle-aged woman, pepper-grey hair in curls, in an emerald green business suit and designer frames, steps into the conversation. “We have, yet we get the impression they’ve not been educated on the importance of OWS to their lives.”
I fight down a dismissive chuckle. “You mean how awesome it is to see so many people, of all ages and backgrounds camping out in the streets in solidarity.” They’re listening intently. I pause and they lower their chins in that universal signal to continue. “It’s moving; it is. Still, I think most are a bit rankled by the optional nature of the hardship – and in a strange way, pleasantly surprised by the harsh police response.”
The man chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Yes... we got that last bit a lot. We’re not really sure that’s what the movement needs to be messaging right now.”
“Oh – you mean chronically poor, many but not all minorities, getting a bit of a kick that relatively healthy, wealthy and white folks are getting a taste of the beat-down that they have been getting all their lives?”
The clean-shaven man, eyeless behind his shades, nods and frowns. “Yes... I’m not sure that kind of class resentment is properly focused on the responsible parties.”
I turn my head to the right and lean back slightly. “Fred, that you back there?” I call out.
“Yep.” I don’t have to see him. I recognize the raspy voice as Fred’s, the product of decades of his breathing fiber from stuffing insulation under floors and dust from putting up drywall. He can’t work anymore; another used-up piece of human machinery not worth the cost of upkeep (read: health care).
“Fred’s the kind of person you angels have in mind as a poster image for your marketing. Surely, he’s an easy person to recruit.” I turn half-around. “Fred, come talk to these folks.”
“Okay – can I get my sandwich first and come around?”
“Of course, you go on ahead and get your food.” We wait about ninety seconds and there stands Fred, a full foot shorter than the young man with the rock-star looks. (Or maybe punk-rock; who can tell these days?)
“Scoop and Nell are saving a chair for me but it won’t be easy if it stays unclaimed,” Fred warns.
I size up Fred, for the hundredth time. His skin is chapped and cracked from the cold, tan and charcoal in the way that living half in shelters, half in streets does – nothing but flesh and carbon in Fred’s world. He coughs, painfully. I wince; the angels wince. Fred grimaces. “Excuse me,” he says politely.
“You know who we are, Fred?” the woman-angel asks. I notice her eyes match the dark green of the outfit. I also notice the diamond limning of contacts, and a rim of dark-brown, almost black iris around them. Colored eyes as accessories; yes, they live in carbon, too, but even that is another world.
“Yes, you are the folks come to put us on the news – online,” Fred adds quickly.
“It’s more; we’re also here to give you information about the Occupy movement.”
Fred lifts up a sandwich and takes a small nibble; he will make this sandwich last for half an hour. Most of the long-time regulars eat slowly. He swallows, and then answers. “I heard there was food down at one of the parks. The rumors were everywhere. I went; it was a long way from here. I was about two-thirds there when I saw folks, ah, like me coming back the other way. They said ‘don’t bother; there’s no food for us.’ I asked why. ‘They said it was just for the protesters.’ So I turned back, too late to eat that night here; I went hungry that evening.”
“You know that was just talk; you would have been welcomed had you continued on,” the young man said.
“I know it’s a two hour walk for a chance, and I saw hungry people coming back from trying, disappointed.”
It was the woman who spoke next. “How can Occupy make it right with you?”
Fred took another nibble of his sandwich, and chewed on this thought in sync with his bologna and Wonder Bread. “Occupy closer.”
“But the people we need to confront are downtown – in the citadels of power.”
“They’re not hungry downtown.” Fred chuckled sadly. “If they are they get shooed away by the blue.”
“Yes... speaking of the ‘blue’... you don’t like them very much, do you?” it was the man again, clearly searching for a connection with Fred. I had seen this before, when other angels had come to visit the shelter.
Fred shrugs. “Some are fine. Most let you off with a tap of a nightstick or a gentle shove with the boot if they catch you sleeping in public – if they recognize you’re a regular, not a transient, they might even look in on you if you’re respectful.”
“What a way to live,” mutters the woman.
“It’s life for many, and coming for many more – which is why I think you and yours ‘Occupy’,” Fred says.
The angels nod in earnest agreement. The woman glances to her left; a phone is aimed at this conversation by a short, strong man with short gray hair and indeterminate age. They’ll edit this later but I can see the gleam in their eyes. They know this is The Shot Du Jour.
“That’s very true; the middle class is being dissolved right before our eyes; it really is all of us in the 99% against the 1%.”
My eyes glance down at Fred’s brown mud-caked work shoes, with the right sole half-detached, then over to the woman’s shining dark-red pumps. They’re not Prada but they’re expensive enough for a soup kitchen, easily three hundred dollars. They have collected a touch of grime on side of the left heel, visible to me.
In the sense that the feet of the 1% never touch the earth, never mind mud and grime, and only those of the 99% do so, everyone here is the same.
Fred notices my gaze; so does the woman who shifts her feet. He glances down. “Nice shoes,” he says. “Who’d you kill to get them?”
The woman laughs. “No one, I bought them myself.”
“How much?” Fred blurts out.
“Oh, really... I don’t think I want to discuss money here. That’s so crass.”
“I’m guessing three hundred bucks,” I say. She glares at me.
“No, not that much,” she says trailing off. I’m high off the mark... my guess is not by too much. “How much does it cost to feed dinner to these people?”
“Three hundred bucks.”
“That’s all? I would have thought more with the staff and overhead...”
“Volunteers. Facility use is donated by the ‘weak-tea myth-ists’ across the way.” In my experience UU’s were seldom rich but generally resourceful; great friends to have.
The UU woman serving tea laughed loudly. The angels’ heads all turned her way, and then returned slowly to the conversation.
“Nothing hostile was meant by that.” The emerald-clad angel says.
I shrug. “I’m not UU. Most of the regular patrons here at the shelter aren’t, either.”
“I am – and proud of it!” the tea-server calls out brightly.
I grin and gesture toward her. “Then there’s Glynnis.”
“We respect diversity, of course,” the woman continues. “Which is why we are here, to educate... “She regroups “... to educate ourselves on how we can better communicate with the full range of the 99%.”
I look up at the caged wall clock, high up near the ceiling. “We have about twenty minutes left. Take a shift on the serving line.”
The young man with the nice jacket grimaces, but quickly catches himself. The emerald woman pauses, assesses the optics of filming her team serving soup and sandwiches to genuine, been-99%-before-it-was-cool 99%, and jumps at the chance. “Certainly. “
I confess that I expected this bunch to balk – just too polished, too suave, too comfortable in a world apart from the streets to function well. I was wrong; they took to it with a flourish. The sensitive young man in his leather jacket actually put his brusqueness to good use, keeping some discipline in the line as later in the shift people kept coming up for seconds on tea.
There were some tense moments; ‘Emerald’ was in a well-represented age range amongst our regulars, which made her fair game for flirting in a way that a younger woman would not be. She did not handle the attention well at first, the looks, the admiring words, the brave brush of her hand as she handed out cups of soup. She was eyeing the off-duty officer to make sure he was close at hand, but in time she relaxed and found a cordial aloofness that worked for the situation. Tested in battle, as it were.
I nod approvingly; the angels did well, overdressed as they were.
As it turned out there were some extra makings. “Any of you hungry?”
The young man, now sweating, his coat off (and on the off-duty cop’s chair for safekeeping), shrugs. “Sure – is the bologna farm-grown?”
Emerald glances at the soup pot. “I’m vegetarian; I could have some soup, if this is organic.”
I just smile. Even the half of their lives that is in carbon is in a different world.
Eventually, the angels sort out which of them will eat and which will simply drinking some powdered tea out of politesse. All are excited.
“OMG!” It’s said as an acronym, you can hear it. “We got to help out!”
“This is going to be great video; I’ve uploaded the file to YouTube and I’ll hack at it with the Video Editor later.”
“YouTube? I sent mine to my PC.”
“PC? Get an editor app on your phone already!”
Like I said, a different world.
Still, as the angels make their farewells, discussing the patterns of their flocks’ dispersion - one to Los Angeles, one to Toronto, another to Boston and places throughout the Tri-State area, I thought – they showed up. They came from their half-silicon, half-carbon world to ours, nothing but soot and grime and grinding, smothering smog of despair.
They came because circumstances demanded it that, all their fine electronics and clothing and years of good dental care and excellent nutrition aside, they were to the last angels terrified of getting their halos dimmed and their wings clipped. They were afraid of that little touch of mud on Emerald’s left heel becoming feet of half-separated leather and clay, like Fred’s.
They were afraid because for the first time in their lives, they had opened their eyes… and seen it was dark, and that the sun, the moon and the very stars they thought within reach were not going out, so much as being spirited away.
It must be hard to recognize that, though angels, they were still earthbound, beholden to the whims of gods who no longer had so much use for them.
And something in them saw – and saw that bit more clearly tonight – that their own years of discomfort looking at the low of income and of status was, in really, looking down a shallow slope that was getting flatter and flatter with each passing day.
Some had called for a level playing field; this is not what they had in mind, but the field was leveling quickly.
This was an hour ago – I think about the angels as I turn out the lights; in eight hours, the breakfast shift begins; more angels – a different flock this time – are due for that.
I turn out the light and lock the shelter entrance door. I glance up, over the carbon-covered tenements, past the haze-shrouded citadels of light spiking from the horizon, up to patches of cold clear winter sky.
The Moon is full; the stars are out. The Moon used to be in reach, in an age where the middle class was not so quick to align in solidarity with the poor – because they weren’t poor back then; the hillside was high enough to suffice. The Moon is out of our reach now – not just metaphorically. Perhaps it will be again.
And perhaps all our moons and stars will be, every dream we cleave to.
That’s going to take a lot of changing hearts to happen, though. A lot more angels set to flight, a lot more eyes opening for the first time – that it is dark, and getting darker, and will get darker still for a hard while to come.
I will tell you my dream, the moon I dream of: That it will get better, that one day, people will come to serve and be served lunch not because they need shelter but because this hall is made into a place of fellowship, where there is always makings left over for another sandwich or cup of soup… and the food is of the best quality.
I dream of a world where I open my eyes, and though it is dark, it is because it is night and the heavens are resplendent with stars and streamers of fulfilled dreams of every kind.
I put the keys in my pocket and shuffle home, favoring my left knee. I feel a piece of paper in my pocket and smile. It is Emerald’s email. I did not have the heart to tell her I did not have an account.
Yet again: A different world.
But that’s changing fast.
And someday after that, it will change for the better.
I just know it.