Stars for Sale - Discount Sky
"The law in all its majesty, forbids the rich, as well as the poor,
from sleeping under a bridge, begging in the streets, stealing a loaf of
bread."
Anatole France.
There
are groups of people who are made to exist on the margins of our society. The
people and groups I get to be with each day are marginalized
and the place they occupy is vicious, brutal and hostile ground. What these
folks are separated from are matter that in another time or another place
would have been seen as the commons, the patrimony, the inheritance, the
God-given, the milk flowing from the breast of Choumolungo: clean air, water
to bathe in, a private place to evacuate their bowels, tools to make a
living, a place to dwell, make love, holler at or hug their kids.
These deprivations are terrible but do not describe any one's whole
life experience, the tempo, tenor or tone of an individual's existence:
suffering is never meaningless, companionship is possible, solitude is
enviable, and there is a clarity of purpose when at the knife's edge of
survival. There is a freedom available - no company line needs to be kept
to; one is free to wear brown shoes with a black suit; footloose exploration
is possible so long as one avoids swimming in the pools of the powerful.
I notice that with me I seem to have no time, the poor have no money, the
homeless have no place to live: all are poverties in a place of plenty.
There is a reverse - my days are not empty, the poor don't have to worry
about their Mercedes being stolen, and the homeless get to see the stars
at night.
There have been changes in what we call homelessness over the past
25 years. The removal of skid row from Philadelphia in the sixties, the
de institutionalization of mentally ill people through the seventies, the
withdrawal of support of public housing during the eighties, the evaporation
of many manual laboring careers, and the more recent diminishment in the
public's willingness to offer outdoor relief (money direct to the poor).
I sense, but I'm not certain, that we are forming the foundation of social
response to poor people that includes very close scrutiny and supervision
of their lives and the elaboration of small scale privatized institutions
to do that. Are we beginning a new period of indoor supervision of
the poor? Different than the great liberal and humanely intended movement
of institutionalization that began in the mid 1800's in America.
What seems different today is the kind of institution in which people
are placed: much smaller, oftentimes managed as a private (non-governmental)
entity, though nearly always with public funds, with more or less strict
public accountability through contract-based direction.
Nearly all this kind of work is seen as flowing not from the freedom
restraining authority of government but from its 'welfare of its citizens
' charge. For many years I worked for the city's welfare department and
I understood my work to be useful to the poor people that I was sent to.
And I think that it was. But there was also a pattern in our work that
only now am I beginning to discern.
My years at DPW can be seen as a time when people were moved from one
type of supervised place to another with a brief period of misery called
homelessness. All attention was, as still is, called to the point of transition
from one of these places to another; and that point of transition is called
'Homelessness'. But beginning and end points have been State Hospitals
to Mental Health Homes (CRR's, supervised SRO's, 'transitional housing',
Personal care Boarding houses), this for that section of our citizenry
that heretofore were collected into large State run Asylums: from Public
housing to shelters: from careers in manual and factory labors to persistent
joblessness. Prisons seem to be a type of institution we are willing to
enlarge. There are movements to establish 'Halfway houses' for miscreant
not likely to do further extensive harm (Accountants at banks need to be
accountants at banks in order to commit their particular kind of larceny:
without the opportunity of the job, they are not likely to be able to steal
the money) they end up in the cheaper to run carcerals - halfway houses
- rather than the more expensive prisons. Older disabled people are moved
toward nursing homes.
Over the past ten years in Pennsylvania outdoor relief has diminished
drastically. Act 49, and Act 75 were the two most benchmark decisions we
made as Pennsylvanians that we didn't trust that welfare money was being
well used. Over this same period of time, again my only experience is Philadelphia
and Pennsylvania, more funds were committed for these small private institutions
(shelters, SRO's, transitional houses, supervised/supportive treatment-requiring
houses).
At the same time that individual poor guys around here were being cut-off
welfare without any job prospect, the state was asking Bethesda to take
its funds and shelter them. The more elegantly we were able to define these
guys as needy (need treatment for addiction, need literacy training, need
treatment for mental illnesses, need job skills, need programs so they
aren't on streets in daytime) the more ready was the government to give
us money to satisfy those needs. I'm not saying that any of this was untrue,
I;m just saying that in retrospect the whole thing has a kind of grammar or
pattern to it.
It was/is a kind of template - in all the chaos and disorder and messiness
of trying to get by in those times, if something fit the template it persisted,
and now after a while one is able to see the shape of the pattern, or part
of it. Without putting too fine a point on it, it looks from my admittedly
odd viewpoint, that we are willing to help the poor most when they are
willing to accept pretty close supervision and direction of their lives.
Freedom is partly a matter of being able to buy it on your own.
Which is what the Anatole France quotation is saying. I accept this
most days, and I partly understand the notion that individual effort needs
to be made for our economic system to continue to function. But I guess
I draw a line somewhere. We have been born into a bountiful world - part
of that bounty is the inheritance from the men and women before us who
built the buildings, roads, schools, enterprises, corporations, communications
networks upon which we rely and prosper, We inherit all this along with
the obligation to continue to work to care for it. And maybe people who
don't work and contribute for it should not have great expectations of
enjoying its fruits. When I row out on the Schuylkill River, I look at
the skyline of Philadelphia and I marvel at what predecessors have built.
But when I look down on the river, across at the trees, and up at white
clouds on a spring blue sky, I think of a bounty not man-made, not laboriously
produced and not man-given. I am okay with the reality that the poor do
not get to drink Perrier water cause they haven't worked for it, and others
have dug the well, bottled it, shipped, trucked, shelved, sold, inventoried
and paid for this with their labors. But God gave all the river, the trees,
the air; not just those who labor but even those who don't; 'deserve' doesn't
enter into the picture, not our judgment to make.
If we choose in our power to take the waters of the river - for Limerick
power plant cooling, for Philly water works or Reading Sewer authority,
and the air to be used for the effluent of ARCO oil refinery or Allied
chemical, and the trees for the paper on which to print this newsletter
then we should recognize that we have appropriated something that belongs
as much to the people who can't afford PECO service, don't have a place
to receive municipal water, can't afford a car to gas up with ARCO
unleaded. This bounty is theirs quite as much as those who manage to acquire
purchasing power. They should be compensated as well as the next, not because
they are poor and deserve our compassion, but because the earth is theirs,
creation is every bit as much their gift as it is those of us richer and
more powerful.
Joe Ferry
Bethesda Project
