Resourcefully Homeless

This week's Featured Friday Foto arose from the class/race discussions precipitated by Katrina.

I snapped this shot the other day at lunchtime in a midtown Manhattan park.  Here's this fellow sitting in front of his bicycle, on which he probably carries all his worldly goods. 

Moments earlier, he and a female companion were cautiously hunched over a small café table, dividing up a pile of cash.  I noticed this unusual sight and caught a glimpse of at least one $100 bill, several $50s, and a neat little stack of additional currency.  He looked over his shoulder at me several times to assure himself that I was no threat to their business.

What's my point?  That poor people are not all the same, and often a lot smarter and resourceful than our prevailing cultural biases would lead us to believe.

Homeless people and others living in poverty sometimes choose to live, "off the grid" for lots of reasons.  Some of those reasons are rationally sound (e.g., not wanting to participate in the lifestyle and practices that conventional employment demands) others, less so (e.g., delusional beliefs of all kinds about government control).  Sometimes, it's a little of both.

Others are struggling to break into the conventional economy but unable to do so for a variety of reasons: social, behavioral, cognitive and/or emotional.

We've come to a point at which poverty is considered a shameful condition.  By those who are not poor, that is.  Many of the poor themselves seem to feel differently.  Many of the people we saw trapped in New Orleans did not seem ashamed of being poor.  Poor people are used to struggling to get by.  These circumstances were certainly extraordinary, but more in degree, than in kind.

I think this in itself is frustrating to the average American.  I can hear people wondering, "how can this young woman be in this situation with this baby and not be ashamed of herself?"  And, I wonder how many secretly shared Barbara Bush's sentiment as she walked among evacuees in Houston's Astrodome:

... so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.

Maybe it's always been so; I don't know.  I sense the attitudes toward poverty are different in other cultures (Skandanavia comes to mind), but I'm reluctant to believe the conventional wisdom about this without having had the opportunity to actually speak with poor people in those cultures.

But not everyone who's poor and/or homeless lacks skills, intelligence or resoucefulness.  Seeing poor people as a homogeneous group is as much of a mistake as seeing those of us who live in Fairfield County, Connecticut as homogeneous. 

And, as I can tell you from personal experience, some of us in that latter group are as much outliers in our cohort as the resourceful fellow pictured above seemed to be in his.

Comments

[Connie Sartain]

very cool. so what do you think they were up to? One of the things Barbara Ehrenreich observed in her new book (bait & switch) is the genuine comraderie among blue collar workers (and by extension poorer and homeless)vs what she experienced in the unemployed middle management. In my experience no amount of charm could gin up much friendship w/ other execs, not soin my poor bookselling environment. Booksellers are tight. We bond over management (down with) and customers (how crazy are these people) and dreams (when my book, music, movie, art etc is published).

So, I'm dying to know who these people were (and you just let them slip through your fingers!) Actually, it's an extraordinary compliment that they didn't consider you a threat to their enterprise. Why not, if you were watching them, with a camera?