| I'm in New York! Actually, I've been in New York for two weeks now, which is why I haven't posted anything. Things never stop in New York- you can go out every night and still have a million new things to do the next day. This is only getting written because I finally had to beg off out of exhaustion- I haven't fully overcome my slow moving Southernness, I guess- everyone else is still out.
My life here is everything I was looking for. My apartment's perfect and really mine- I finally feel like an independent entity. I'm busy in a way I couldn't have imagined. I work all day- I leave my apartment around 8:15 and usually work till 6. We don't really have a lunch break. I work in Communications for SEIU 1199 National Benefit Fund. Our office is right off Times Square, so that my morning trek out of the subway is an experience in and off itself. I think I'm personally bombarded by more people trying to move in the opposite direction than even live in the city of Charlottesville. It's loud and crowded and pushing, but somehow invigorating. The builiding the Fund is in is incredible-- it's over 50 years old and a sort of kelly green color and has horrendous elevators, so that I spend a lot of time running up and down stairs. I'm on the 31st floor and my desk has a view over the city, so in slow moments I can just stare out at the skyline. The Benefit Fund handles health care benefits for our union members- if you've followed the budget cuts and tax "reforms" related to health insurance on both the national and New York state level, you can start to imagine how much we have to handle right now. We have a new cost-cutting initiative, which is actually really well thought out- it's a shame most Americans don't have access to a program this good. But we have to develop the materials to teach all our members about the initiative and what it means for their benefits. Last week I designed a powerpoint for 2500 members- who knew powerpoint skills would be so useful? And I'm supposed to be the go to person on current events research, so a big part of my job is just reading newspapers and keeping up with health care and insurance happenings- sort of a huge undertaking, but I'm enjoying it.
Anyway, besides work I have class Wednesday and Thursday from six to nine. This is mainly an exercise in holding my tongue- these are not classes designed to be welcoming to econ majors. But learning not to argue with everything might be a good experience for me. Also, I'll be working with public school students early Monday mornings and serving lunch to homeless New Yorkers on Sunday afternoons- just to keep my hand in the whole community service thing. And Kaplan training starts next month. And I'm doing a couple catering jobs for extra money. So basically I have enough going on to be tired even without going out. But this is New York, so go out I do. This week we did a poetry reading at 13 on Monday, I had a training on Tuesday, we hit up a hole in the wall drinking spot for the State of the Union Wednesday and a midtown bar on Thursday. And tonight I went to a union sponsored black history month party.
This party was something else. First of all, I was one of about three white people in the room. The people in my program who came with me were all black. So I felt- very white. At the same time, the exclusionary feeling that I used to get even on the Sterling bus some days in Virginia wasn't there. There was an openness and willingness to share and teach that I never felt in the south. They gave us a soul food dinner, so that now I know what soul food is. Basically it's everything I normally don't eat, but I can't say it wasn't satisfying. Then we had a poet, who read some very angry poems about the state of the black people, particularly black women. It was very powerful stuff and I don't believe that kind of emotion comes from nowhere. It was also a unique experience to listen to poetry with a virtually all black crowd. Even the poetry slams I've been to, which have a significant black audience, are nowhere near this particpatory. There was clapping and yelling in agreement- the poetry was experienced not only by many seperate individuals in the room, but by the group communally. And if this was true for the poet, it was even more so for the keynote speaker, the congresswoman from Georgia who gained noteriety for being the first to question the administration's responsability for 9/11. And lost her seat for it, although she's since regained it. The speaker called for the black community to unite around a political vision. And at least for the moment, it seemed plausible. Because here was a room full of workers who'd come after a full day of work because they wanted to stand behind this movement. The political aims of the sponsoring union were not extraordinary- social security, better schools, better health care. What was extraordinary to me was the positive energy- the dedication- the willingness to try to make a difference. It's one thing for me to sit behind a desk and try to solve these people's problems from arm's length. It's infinitely better for them to come together and make the solutions and the fight for those solutions their own. To be the shaping force behind their reality, from which I am unavoidably removed.
Which brings me to another amazing thing about New York. The disparities in wealth that exist everywhere are explicit here with a tremendous force. Today, I got on a train in midtown. It's tax free week, so midtown's completely clogged with tourists dropping thousands of dollars on purses and boots. Money's dropped without a second thought- a ten dollar lunch is cheap, a pitcher of beer can run $20 and no one raises an eyebrow. Anyway, at 103rd street, Tom entered my train. He had a lot of hair on his face and none on the top of his head. He had a huge smile and he smelled pretty bad. I admit, my first reaction was to groan- you spend a lot of time on subways in New York and you get to be too much of an expert on diverting your eyes to signal to the nameless tramp on board that you haven't got a dollar. Tom, however, was not dissauded. Tom curtseyed to me. And then asked if I'd ever seen a man curtsey. This was the beginning of a spirited monologue, which gradually became a dialogue, which ended at my stop at 125th street. When I shook Tom's hand as I left, it was obvious that he'd spent a lot of nights in the cold, gloveless, learning to ignore frostbite. Tom was likely retarded and he likely drank too much- an economist would likely have to pronounce Tom pretty worthless- he certainly wasn't producing anything. But was he so much worse than the thousand dollar purse toting productive citizens that would walk by him later that night? Less productive I guess, but I don't know, I sort of liked him better.
So that's my cliched story for tonight. My point though is really less about the division here between the rich and the poor, as astounding as it is, but about the duality in the city between pervasive unreality and painfully whole reality. It's easier here, perhaps easier than anywhere else, to disconnect from reality. There are more entertainments to lose yourself in- theater, music, movies, clubs, bars- than anywhere I've ever been. You can work for the something like 70,000 non profits in the city and save the world in the abstract- something like what I'm doing- while drifting through your own comfortably distanced existence. Because the white collars, the upper and upper middle classes- we have a choice. We can choose to live apart from reality. We can choose not to struggle, to avoid risks, to avoid discomforts. We have the freedom to live in a sort of dream state. This pervasive unreality, however, depends on the painful reality of the lower and middle classes, who don't have this protective bubble, this safety net of choice. Their lives are a constant expression of and coping with reality. They can't put problems at arms length because the problems are theirs. They can't distract themselves with saving the world- they're busy trying to make sure the electric bill gets paid. That they won't end up sleeping on the street next to Tom. Or perhaps they are Tom. The reality of below freezing temperatures is unavoidable when you're sleeping in them. Almost fifty percent of black men between the ages of 16 and 64 in New York City are unemployed. That's a reality that means their children aren't eating or that their wives and girlfriends are working twice as hard so that their children are being raised by TV sets instead of mothers. That's real life, without any insulation, without that safety net of white collar families, white collar institutions, white collar salaries. And our bubble can't exist without their pain- our trains won't run, our dinners won't be premade, our bathrooms won't be cleaned, even our do-gooder jobs won't exist, since without their pain, who do we have to save? Without their painful reality, what do we hide behind to maintain our unreality?
That was long, and I really am exhausted. I'm not reading over or editing, so excuse rambling, logical fallacies, misspellings, etc. But in closing, New York is probably the most amazing city in America, if not in the world. I wonder though, if I'm saying that without really living here- without taking on its reality. It seems like I've brought my bubble with me. |
