Shame on me, Shame on you: Where is the Love?

by tidbitscommentary

As the first piece to my recently launched blog, I’d like to talk about an issue that touched me two days ago. An issue that I think many of us ignore or are not always aware of. Two days ago I was doing some field interviews for my job on the Westside of Chicago and decided to stop in Humboldt Park at the Knockbox cafe for a cup of Green Dragon Tea and a pastry. After ordering my cup of tea and grabbing the tube of honey to sweeten it, I sat down at a slightly rickety wooden table and decided to relax a bit and observe the scene. While there, an older man in a wheelchair rolled in, pushed by a woman dressed in a long blue t-shirt hanging down to her thighs, which gave the impression that she had nothing on under it or was wearing just a pair of underwear that— from my vantage point—couldn’t be clearly detected. I watched them enter the cafe as they glanced around for an empty table or space for them to sit. She then pushed him towards me after noticing that my table was quite empty and spacious enough to wheel him up for him to sit without intruding on my personal space. Initially I was thinking, “why here??” I kind of wanted my space to myself despite it being enough room. But then I looked around and realized that my table was the only table that could accommodate him. In my attempt to not show my reluctance to have him there, I stood up and moved one of the chairs out of the way so that she could wheel him directly up to the table. They seemed to appreciate that small gesture. 

Shortly after the woman pushed him up to the table, she left out and left him there as he sat in his brown jacket, cane in hand with the end of it poised on the wheelchair’s leg next to his foot. He began making calls on his cell phone, and in between him calling out, people were calling in. Repeatedly. Generally, I dislike ringers. They irritate me because they alert everyone to an incoming call and disturb whatever joyful silence that was a part of the atmosphere before the phone rang. In this case, I was more than irritated. His phone rang repeatedly, and I sat there with a growing urge to ask him to turn the fucking ringer down or off. I get like that sometimes, but rarely do I show it. So I just ignored my thoughts and his cell phone and tried to take in the rest of the scenery: people reading books, tinkering with laptops or IPads, sipping on cups of coffee or some other hot beverage, and otherwise being absorbed in their own world. For my voyeuristic tendencies, this was a perfect moment to think about the personal narratives behind the cafe’s patrons. I pass time like this sometimes. I enjoy trying to unravel the stories behind the nameless, unknown faces I see. But today, it was impossible because the older gentleman’s phone kept buzzing into the air to displace my thoughts like a brick hailed into a calm pond of water. The only difference is that it was like several bricks being fired back to back, causing splashes and chaotic ripples. My thoughts were miserably disturbed.

Eventually, I relaxed. And then I started to pay attention to his conversation. Hell, why not? It was just like observing others. The good thing about it was that I didn’t have to imagine anything, concoct anything, or drum up some kind of story for people I had no clue about. But that’s when it hit me as I sat there eavesdropping: this guy had a very serious issue going on that didn’t simply arouse my curiosity but created pangs within me and made me indignant at the world for his suffering. For his seeming tragedy…

The older man had been making desperate calls to resolve a pressing issue that he was experiencing: he was on the brink of becoming homeless. His furniture was going to be thrown out into the street within the next 24 hours and he had no money to move or no place to go. He had two children who relied on him, and two siblings who were apparently unreliable. From the sound of it, he had been struggling with his health, was obviously disabled, and had no real caretaker. He was also on disability income, which I instantly knew was a paltry piece of income that could do nothing to prevent his inevitable homelessness. He related all of these things to the folks he spoke to over the phone and as time passed, I could see the look of despair in his eyes, the cloud of stifled tears wanting to burst out like water in a broken dam. He was holding on to his last bit of pride, it seemed, by not crying in public. Yet it would have been easy for him to cry and go largely unnoticed because no one else paid him any attention. It was a sad case to witness.

I sat there still, in my chair, trying to force my eyes to not look his way as he talked. I tried to allow my mind to drift in to another direction, on to better and brighter subjects, but given my biased sensitivity to such issues, I couldn’t resist thinking about how he felt and what I could do to help. My mind drew a blank at this latter thought, for which I regretted later as I drove home from the Westside. It’s not that I couldn’t think of any resources to help him, it’s just that I knew that whatever I recommended would be full of too much bureaucratic red tape to aid him in this emergency. That’s what’s so fucked up about it: I know that the resources are not only limited but that they are also inadequate for addressing these kinds of issues.

During my drive home, I kept thinking about one of my experiences in the field of social work when I worked on the Westside of Chicago doing home visits to poor older adults in need of assistance. This experience was the most heart-wrenching experience I’ve had in my short career as a direct service worker. During the beginning of the economic crisis when millions of people started losing their homes and jobs and scrambling for help, I worked in the community of poor older folks and witnessed how much of a failure our country was to people who deserved to live with dignity and honor and comfort at a such stage in life. I walked into many homes and apartments and observed debilitated elderly people living in squalor, some losing their homes after paying on it for 20 or 30 years, others stranded in catacomb like buildings (CHA housing for the elderly)—which was no different than the project housing that was now largely defunct in many parts of the city—and others disabled, sleeping on cold floors without health insurance, income, or family support. There were days I simply dreaded walking into work because what I observed was too tragic, too disheartening, too upsetting, too damn painful to watch. I couldn’t handle it at times—seeing so many older black men and women suffer, agonize, sometimes cry, sometimes wallow in misery at such an age. I wanted to know why should anyone live like that? And why so many black folks? Why so many older black families losing their homes? Why so many older black men and women holed up in these project-like buildings, concentrated in a massive tomb of despair? Why so many older black women and men lacking sufficient support?

After a few months of doing that job, I knew that I was a fool. I was a fool for walking into those homes thinking that I was “helping” them. I was a fool for assuming that what I offered would be of any consequence. I was a fool for allowing the field of social work to convince me that social justice was about conducting home assessments, instilling personal responsibility despite the obvious structural and policy barriers,  and playing street-level bureaucrat to the utterly poor and marginalized. I was an outright fool for all those unthinking claims I digested on the job: the mantra of “providing advocacy,” the theme of “fighting for justice,” the trite proclamation of “empowering” people. How the fuck was that empowerment?

It is in this spirit that I drove home—thinking these very thoughts, recollecting on this experience, and contemplating the older man’s plight whom I left at the café. Was I a fool for leaving him there without any words, help, or guidance?

Maybe. I reckon my feelings after the fact could do nothing to help him emerge from that pit of misery he was soon to be plunged into. In this regard, I was just like every other inattentive patron in the café. I might as well have not paid him any attention.

Shame on me, shame on all of us. As a country, we don’t know what love is…