This past Tuesday about 2:00 a.m., a tenant of mine, an extraordinarily kind young man, 29 years old, was mugged and shot as he was coming home from an evening with friends, It happened about 50 yards from the front door of my building in what is now a gentrified section of the city.
At about the same time, Bloomberg’s NYPD, outfitted in the latest anti-terrorist gear, descended without warning on the sleeping protesters in Zuccotti Park, and with saws and knives proceeded to cut down the tents and haul away their possessions. The middle-of-the-night action was marked by the enforced absence of the news media.
Tuesday afternoon, as I headed to the hospital where my tenant lay with a bullet in his neck unable to move, I heard that Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia had been honored at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that would be arguing before the high court against Obama’s healthcare bill. www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-scalia-thomas-20111114,0,7978224.story
My tenant, up until Tuesday that is, had been trying to build his own business as a recruiter of healthcare executives. To supplement his income, he worked nights at a restaurant located in a refurbished bank building where a dinner runs about $150 per person. My tenant has no health insurance. He is one among 50 million, or one in six of us.
As journalist Chris Hedges, put it in his brilliant piece, This is what Revolution Looks Like www.truth-out.org/what-revolution-looks/1321384587:
“The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He (the mayor) says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion…”
Is it really so hard to see the suffering? With all our human brilliance, why is compassion in such short supply?
My tenant knows from compassion. Six months ago, I called to ask if he might consider moving out of the apartment; it was long before his lease was up. I explained to him that my landlady had suddenly decided to sell the house that I’d called home for many years. She’d given me 60 days to pack up—dog, cat, office, daughter and all—and find another place. The apartment seemed like the easiest solution. “Of course,” he said, “not a problem.”
From what I can see, there’s not a whole lot of kindness left in the country we’ve become. A country where being poor is your own damn fault, and conning families out of their homes is business as usual. Where the right to carry a gun wields more weight than a sick neighbor’s access to a doctor, and where the saving of face (and funds) for an institution trumps the raping of children.
How could it be, that for the sake of the almighty buck, our corporate “persons” justify the taking of lives—as they despoil our water, our food source, the air we breathe?
And for that same buck, or maybe just for the hell of it, a desperate sick soul in the dark night of a random Tuesday guns down a gentle, loving young man and blows away his dreams.
Sixties Chick 