by Jason Jem
November 23rd, 2001
This is America, on a crisp autumn evening, on San Julian Street in Downtown Los Angeles. City of Angels, land of great opportunities. Ms. Mary Green and Mr. Maurice Pressman are busy with a roll of masking tape, putting the finishing touches on their new home. However, we're not in a typical Southern California suburb. Mary and Maurice are not local versions of Martha Stewart and Bob Vila. Their new home, along with hundreds of others in this neighborhood, is five feet wide, six feet long, and three feet high, and made out of cardboard and plastic sheets. They even have a small rug and some bedding inside it. No, they didn't put up a satellite dish.
This is America, where you can walk on L.A.'s Skid Row and think you are in a Third World country. Or America during the Great Depression. Or China one hundred years ago. Or Africa today.
This is America. A neighborhood where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homeless people sleep, eat, fight, love, wash, laugh, and cry away their days and nights, on the street.
This is America, where only six blocks away, stand dozens of Los Angeles' tallest skyscrapers, symbols of wealth and power.
This is America, breadbasket to the world, where this portly homeless woman politely tells me she does not want me to buy her any food in exchange for her photograph. She explained: "Honey, thank you, but we don't need your food. You won't believe the hundreds of pounds of food that gets dumped every night from the Missions and charities. We have more than enough food. What we do want is some spare change. If you think we're going to buy drugs with the money, no I'm totally 'clean'! We can use a little money to buy some other items, such as beer or cigarettes, or sometimes we wanna play cards with our neighbors and need a little money. We're no different than you; we enjoy the same pleasures of life, just like you. Our little hooches are just like your homes, except our is only 30 square feet, if we're lucky. And you don't need to take apart your house every morning at 5 a.m., when city workers come by to hose off the sidewalk. And in the late afternoon, we have to build them up again."
I realized this woman isn't the stereotypical homeless person, when she quoted a statistic, "The American homeless care industry is an $8 billion industry. But 85% of it disappears into the pockets of the organizers, or what they call office overhead." (A few years ago, it was reported in the news, Goodwill Industries' executives embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
Mary takes me on a guided tour of her neighborhood. We pass by two men digging through a large carton of sneakers. One of them says, "This one's for basketball," and throws it back in, then "This one's for running," and tosses it, and fifnally, "Ah ha, here's a pair of tennis sneakers!" This is America, where beggars can be choosers!
Please do not misunderstand the awful conditions of life on the streets, based on the words of this one friendly, very lucid and knowledgeable woman. Many homeless people can be friendly and harmless. But many more are dangerous drug addicts, former psychiatric patients who are on the streets due to our conservative politicians closing mental institutions. Of course, there are many people who are just plain lazy, in this land of greatest opportunity.
I wonder, should we take care of these fellow humans? If we don't take care of the less fortunate, the lucky, aggressive, conservative, intelligent, successful and wealthy will just keep on accumulating everything their acquisitive hands can reach. The ultimate form of our country's Republican party philosophy of "rewarding entrepreneurs who take risks and therefore deserve the rewards," if taken to an extreme, results in feudalism. The ultimate form of our Democratic party's philosophy of "providing for the less fortunate," if taken to an extreme, results in communism.
We have had, during most of our fine country's imperfect recent history, a pendulum swinging between these two opposing philosophies. We have to let it swing freely; if not, the weight at either extreme will result in chaos.
1500 years ago, Confucius wrote "Greed leads to acquisition. Forced acquisition is stealing. The ultimate form of forced acquisition is war. War is ultimately unproductive, because the conqueror has to spend more money and resources to maintain all these new acquisitions."
As we part, I asked Mary what can people do for her and her friends? "Come down and talk to us and make a new friend, just like you did. Do some volunteer work. Meet the other folks who are helping us. We ain't gonna bite!"
This is America, where we can learn some things, even from the folks on San Julian Street, who get by without the weight of material possessions that most of us think they must have. Let's not ruin our great country, and our own well being, by excessive greed and acquisition.
Jason Jem is a photographer, technician, and writer based in Los Angeles
