Archives for October 2008

It’s finally real: my niece rotates out to Kuwait today. Her unit will be there for a month then they move to some as yet unspecified location in Iraq.

The bad news is that her orders say her active duty service is for “not more than 400 days” assuming, of course, that they don’t stop-loss her because, well, they’re the Army and they can do whatever they want.

The good news is that her 400 days started when she went on pre-deployment training on 24 September. I’ll be looking at this clock frequently between now and when the latest is that she could come home. Time to put all that wishing power into a lot of blue states on the map next week.

Time until J. comes home from Iraq

For once my media induced crush is on an actual lesbian. I’m not entirely sure how to act but suffice it to say that I would think Rachel Maddow was the bomb even if she was happily married to a man and had popped out a dozen kids if she was still calling out politicians that way she called out Sarah Palin’s “mendacious prevarication.”

My job moved offices at the beginning of June, from way uptown to in the middle of downtown (three blocks from the White House no less; I went over an stared at it yesterday during an unseasonably warm afternoon). Because there are a lot more people around – office people, vendor people, homeless people – the variety of human experience is a lot wider than it was when the choices for interaction on the street were the few other office dwellers clustered near the metro stop, retirees, and stay-at-home parents (more often nannies) with toddlers.

Over the summer, when the days were long and the evenings pleasant I walked the long way to the subway, through a nearby park and past the worst McDonald’s in the city. Some of why it’s the worst can be traced back directly to the amount of grease just floating in the air outside the building; the rest has to do with the fact that it is gathering place central for particularly aggressive homeless men. Understandably, the change they panhandle goes a lot further on the dollar menu at Mickey D’s than it does anywhere else in the city, but as such it’s a common sight to see guys sleeping right there on the sidewalk. Except, it’s not so common if, like me, you’ve been working uptown for a few years.

One day this past summer I was walking home, minding my own business enjoying the weather and thinking about dinner and I saw this guy sprawled on the sidewalk next to the building, one shoe off, one on, pant leg hiked up. And I do mean sprawled like he’d been dumped from a moving car, except the street was a good 25 feet away. And I had to stop and figure out what to do.

As I got over my shock at seeing him sprawled like that I tried to decide what to do. And in the few seconds it took me to determine that yes, he was breathing and no, he didn’t seem to have any obvious wounds (no big spreading puddle of blood was the first clue) the thought occurred to me: what right do I have to “help” this person?

See, I’m a firm believer in letting people live out their choices. This is not to say that given all the other opportunities in the world that this particular human man would have chosen to sleep on a city street and live dirty looking like he hadn’t bathed in weeks. But given the circumstances of his life, given that he’s a regular fixture of this area, not a transient – and what does it say about us as a society, really, that in urban areas we have “regular” homeless people – and used to surviving in this environment, it’s a moderately safe assumption that he consciously chose to sleep in that spot (or that he was drunk and passed out there but I’ll get to that).

Even if he were completely blitzed out of his mind and just fell to the ground at that spot, isn’t it his life to screw up? What right do I have to impose my values – the ones that prize cleanliness and not sleeping in public places – on him?

And how do you balance people’s right to make screwed up choices, choices you deem to be wrong, against basic human compassion? Is it the broadness of the effect of their choices that give individuals or even society the right to interfere, or does it have to do with the toxicity of their choices?

I’ve been thinking about similar questions in another less charged context as well. There are a couple of people in my office who are just plain weird. Not hippie “I’m recycling everything give me your old tea bag” weird, or even paranoid “let’s by the survival cabin in rural Indiana” weird. Just odd.

There’s one woman in particular who is both weird and in very many ways sort of sad. It doesn’t help that I know some of her backstory – previously homeless, put herself through community college, no family to speak of – and that I find it sad and lonely but she always seems like life has just been kicking her and kicking her hard. It’s not anything she says or does; it’s more of a vibe.

Yet, she’s weird. Her speech patterns are weird. The way she dresses is weird. The way she sporadically engages people in the office is weird and stilted. Something about her just sets my nerves on edge.

The entire combination causes me to wonder: what is my obligation to compassion, to make an effort to engage her, and what is my obligation to self-preservation, to heed that “she’s weird” feeling?

But of course, I have no answers and as always I attribute social awkwardness to my own inability to relate to other human beings. Doesn’t make navigating our malfunctioning two stall bathroom any easier, that’s for sure.

From AP by way of the BBC, this just strikes me as a primeval comment on the structure of American society and our relationship with nature.