Living Under the Freeway

Dear Mr. President,

I took the wrong bus today and ended up some distance from my destination but rather than backtrack or take another bus, I decided to walk. My route took me under the freeway, an area of warehouses and big box stores, parking lots and storage yards. And homeless. The throwaways, the detritus, the druggies, the drunks, the mentally ill, the ones no one wants in their neighborhood or anywhere in sight; men—both black and white—with hard chipped faces laying, sitting or standing on the sidewalk with their ratty blankets and shopping carts, stuffed plastic bags tied to the sides. Mostly shopping carts, but there were a few wagons and garbage cans on wheels, anything that rolled so they could pack quickly when the cops came by to roust them and Move on! Move on! But there was one woman in her 40s, Mexican, her face not ravaged by drugs or drink or mental illness, sweeping with a broom her area, a small encampment of 4 carts neatly lined up with blankets folded and boxes and bags stacked, a picture of a young girl—maybe her daughter—fastened to one of the carts. Through the stench of urine and misery she was struggling to do more than just survive another day, she was trying to reclaim some part of a home she once had, a life she once had. I was reminded of Lolo telling you when you were a boy giving coins to beggars in Djakarta that you didn’t have enough coins to give all the beggars, to not be foolish and give all your money away lest you end up like them. In today’s NYT (p. A1) there’s an article about a top Wall Street regulator who worked 17 years at the SEC and left recently to take a job with a law firm representing Wall Street clients at SEC hearings. His starting salary? $5 million a year. On page A4, an article about the latest Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction report detailing failed reconstruction projects—unneeded military headquarters, unused schools, unfinished highways and electrical plants, a project to prevent roadside IEDs that was only partly done— graft, fraud, theft, missing records, mismanaged, no oversight, much of the $90 billion gone for naught. But no money to bail out Detroit or Stockton or Jefferson County, Alabama. $2 billion for the new NSA data center in Utah to store purloined data but no money for the Mexican woman sweeping garbage from her spot under the freeway who’s down on her luck and doesn’t have the right connections. The American dream is now part of the illusion of American justice.