pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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KLEPTOCRACY, AMERICAN-STYLE, or ANOTHER DAY OF ARMCHAIR �BERLIBERAL RANTING

288.

One letter to the editor notes

It�s easy to be an armchair �berliberal, but out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.

I want to believe that is true. And I know it is sometimes true. I know that people who have very little are often incredibly generous and that a few brave souls will stand up on buses and refuse to sit in the back any longer or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory and that, every once in a great while, humanity makes an incremental step forward in our social evolution. I also recognize that small kindnesses are fragile little things that mostly only exist in places where a level of comfort, even excess, allows such generosities.

And we�re talking about generosities at a time of Abu Ghraib, at a time when the vice president lobbies Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.

When my pal Rosa was in the peace corp. in Africa, a woman whose younger sister had just died told Rosa matter-of-factly that the woman�s twins would now also die. That was just reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm. This kind of resignation of atrocity is sometimes the reality in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive on scant resources generation after generation, but at least the twins might have been put into foster care here and, with a huge degree of luck, they might even have come out unscathed and found themselves in a place that allowed them room to thrive. And poverty in the US is rich by third-world standards, so they would have at least gotten basic shelter and food stamps. ... So let�s all sing oh oh, your worries ain�t like mine now and turn back to our made-for-TV docudramas because, as Barbara Bush said, look how well those poor people are doing. And certainly American poverty doesn�t leave people whose norm is scarcity shell-shocked, right?

I believe it was no mere coincidence that MLK was assassinated after he began to criticize capitalism.

But let�s say that those African twins survived, that they found a way to beg, steal and fight their way into adulthood in a kill-or-be-killed landscape where the formula of the land is You See Food, You Take The Food and ensure your own nourishment. Or maybe they even made the passage to North America, where our formula is You See Money, You Claim It As Your Own�through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminishing workers� rights if you have the resources to rob people legally. Or, if you lack these resources, by robbing and stealing money the illegal way. Or, if you�re one of the many poor but honest working Americans like the ones with whom I was raised, you scrimp and do without your entire life and live in accordance with the tenets of the Holy Bible�that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant, with their eyes firmly fixed on the prize: great wealth will be yours in the afterlife in exchange for all your suffering here.

Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn�t it?

During King Bush the Former's reign, back when I lived in a drug-infested DC neighborhood, drug dealers were the ones who bought the shoeless children shoes, not government programs or any of those nonprofit money-laundering organizations the Republicans have been opening right and um left. Buying the children shoes was good business for the dealers, who were always on the lookout for a fresh new crop of children to hold the goods for them. Now, during King Bush the Latter�s reign, talk to dealers and gang members if you dare and you will understand that many of them recognize the social structures that oppress them and are infuriated that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets of our nation's capital barefoot.

Yes, many dealers were lured to the life purely by the promise of fast cars and easy money, but many others turned to dealing as a desperate way to help their struggling families. In fact, you could argue that, in a country that values profits over our common humanity, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout out of America�s squalor are the true entrepreneurs, that these disenfranchised youth have discovered a (violent) way to achieve the American dream despite the fact that the decks have been stacked against them since birth. Listen to (good) rap music or good indy music or, well, many things, and there's an undercurrent of unrest, an acknowledgment of the reality that you do not have to follow that predetermined script that has been imposed upon you.

Uh huh and yeah, here I am stomping on a soapbox again and man have I stomped that sucker flat! So let me just say that, in other news, it is now 12:30 and Pottergrrrl is still asleep, so I�m about to make her broth and toast and echinacea tea and deliver it to her sniffling self in bed.

Took a long hot bath last night and, when I pulled the plug, I suddenly remembered how, as soon as either the Ginger or I heard the bathtub draining or the shower stop, we would rush in with a towel and wrap it around our nekkid wife (unless we were nekkid there with her). And I felt so empty for a moment. Then I just smiled at the memory, so maybe I'll heal after all.

�

So okay I�ll end with a poem:

WATER PRAYER
By Stuart Kestenbaum

From The SUN magazine (12.2005)

And this morning I awoke to rain, which makes
its own rhythm on the window, and the world is full
of these rhythms, rhythm of water, rhythm of the heart,
which sounds like an underwater pump, the lub-dud
of all it knows, which is making all I know possible,
and on the roof rain falls and turns to hail, then snow,
then rain again, running down the shingles to the gutters,
the gathering-up that makes rivers and lakes and oceans,
from cloud to drop to torrent, how nothing is lost.

LISTENING TO: the tea kettle as it starts to boil

3:38 p.m. - 2006-01-17

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