Brother Can You Spare A Dime?

I couldn't watch the President's address the other night. I couldn't even vent my anger and frustration about the situation. I was on the subway passing 42nd and Times Square with no energy to go join the World Can't Wait/Drive Out the Bush Regime event. I'd spent 3 hours working with adult students some of whom were really struggling with a reading and comprehension exercise. I was asking myself, Who were their teachers before? What was destroyed in ________________ who sits at the back of the room with the blank stare. Why does he not seem to be connecting to what we're talking about. Not even when were talking about a topic he bought up. Why is it that he seems not to have the words to express himself?

So, while Bush rattled on about freedoms on the march/move or whatever, I watched two homeless black men on the subway each in his own world talking to both the imaginary and the real. They were probably about my father's age. My father, the last of the union men, the last of the factory men has managed by some strange twist of fate and a (lawsuit or two) to have worked at the same company for about 38 years. He will retire in about a year or so. I worry about the two men all the way home. When I arrive at my stop, I wave to the one man remaining in the car. He doesn't notice me. He is busy grooming his hair and rubbing his hands over his face. His bare ashen ankles like sugar cane stalks, stretch from a pair of over sized sneakers. His sneakers are the last things I see as the doors close.

These men are not figments of my imagination. They look like men I've seen before. As a child they were the men who hung out at the news stand in my small town of Freehold, New Jersey. But these men have lost something. Family, dignity, and the ability to connect with a world that has continued to ignore and leave them behind.

With Detroit in trouble, the spotlight on poor regulations in the mining industry (and no journalist to tell the story) and the people who have fought the good fight exiting daily I can only see times getting even tougher for the "mythical little man."