What gives? pacificpelican

I recently read How Panhandlers Use Free Credit Cards in The Star, and while I imagine that the writer, Jim Rankin, has his heart in the right place, I can’t help but bristle at the idea that the question is being asked and is so important to those that might drop a few quarters into the palm of a citizen sitting on the sidewalk, begging for change.

Aside from the fact that the article gave spare changers pre-paid credit cards (which we could assume are limited in their drug buying capabilities, but only in a roundabout way), the question of where your money goes when you give it to an obviously needy person is kind of sickening. 

Photo: Tony the Misfit

I’m not attacking Rankin.  This is a question people are obviously keen to know the answer to.  It’s a sentiment you hear often.  “I would give money to bums, but they’d probably spend it on drugs or alcohol.”  

In the context of the article, the people given the credit cards knew their purchases would be reviewed.  We can assume their purchases were edited accordingly. One woman even felt compelled to apologize for having spent the money on cigarettes.  The fact that she felt this way and that Rankin also seemed to think it was something that implied an excuse was necessary shows the writer is on board with the perception that if we give, we should also be cognizant of what the money we give is spent on.

About a year ago, I attended a cultural awareness seminar at the South American Explorers Club.  I found the course enjoyable, but at one point, the topic of how people might spend the money they earned panhandling came up.

One clean scrubbed, bright eyed, overprivileged twenty-something brought up how she didn’t like giving money to homeless people because “they could spend it on anything.”  In the audio version of this story, this is where you here the needle scratch right across the record.  

This wasn’t the first time I had heard this line of logic.  But it was the first time I let loose a cascade of words in incredulous sequence.  

“Why is it your business how they might spend the money you give them?”

“Because they could spend it on drugs.”

“Well, if they do, they need those drugs more than you need your two pesos.  Don’t they?”

I’m not sure how this conversation ended.  I probably scared the poor girl and half the room with my outraged argument.  But in the stark light of have and have not conspicuous in every large city the world over, what purpose does this question serve?

Where does most of the money you spend on a cup of coffee at the Starbucks go? 

Advertising, construction, polluting paper cups.  Even a company that supports fair trade is doing its share of damage.

When you shop at Ambercrombie and Fitch, where do you suppose that money goes? 

Sweat shop labor, ads, promoting an impossible beauty standard, and blasting shoppers ears with payola.

The real answer is that you don’t know and you don’t really care.  You spend the money because you perceive that money going towards a good or service that you want and the real endpoint of that money is invisible to you.

What do you suppose panhandling costs the person doing it?  It’s a job.  Maybe it’s not a job with any discernible purpose, but is it less harmful than working at McDonalds and contributing to deforestation, the pollution of the water supply and chipping away at the collective health of a nation?  I would argue that it is.

Photo: en.en

Panhandling is demeaning job in the grand scheme of things.  If the person panhandling is living on the street, that means he is in search every day for a safe place to sleep, something to eat, dry clothes and a shower.  If a person is homeless, that person has likely spent a less than restless night sleeping on a surface you wouldn’t set your purse down on. 

He feels like shit, is probably in pain and less than ideal health and his diet is a mish-mash of whatever he can get his hands on. Finding a place to take a dump is a problem. Can you imagine what that’s like on a day to day basis?

Then he gets to spend all day on another hard surface asking stone faced strangers who would prefer not to acknowledge him for spare change.

Who are you to place a value judgement on what he buys?  If someone is subjected to all these hardships and chooses to buy alcohol or speed, he obviously needs the speed more than he needs your judgement.  And every dollar you give to a drug addict is a dollar that person is not going to steal from your lilly white ass while you walk by him with your head up it.

If you give money to a panhandler, you can know one thing for certain.  The person you’re giving your money to is the one who’s going to use it.  For nourishment, a clean pair of socks, or to shoot up, your charity is going directly to the source. 

What other form of charity is as pure as that?  There’s no processing fee, no one in a rented office getting their not-for-profit-ass paid, no transportation cost, and most importantly, there is no one making decisions about the most responsible way to spend the money on his behalf.  You are giving a little money that you won’t miss to someone who needs it.  That’s it.

Vetting charity is for organizations.   Spare change is for busses, parking meters, tip jars and people on the street who need it.

That’s what I would say to her if I had the chance to do it over again.

Community Connection

Find out where travelers are most hassled in World’s Most Annoying Cities and the comments field where those with change to give compete for the most annoying beggars in the US and throw your two cents in.

Or if you’re more interested in participating in freeganomics, pop in at BNT where you can learn to live off the good stuff that finds its way to the trash in Dumpster Diving: The Easiest Way to Find Food.

Cartoon by MatadorNights co-editor Kate Sedgwick. All rights reserved.

Community Connection:

What do you think about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case? Share your thoughts below.

All statistical information herein courtesy of Strange Maps

As difficult as it is for us to conceptualize a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) or even a billion (1,000,000,000), the U.S. GDP was estimated at a staggering $13,160,000,000,000. That’s thirteen-trillion, one-hundred and sixty-billion dollars. Too big to fail? Some people think so.

As entertaining as it is to delve into the concept that money is a fabrication, a symbol that we all buy into that doesn’t exist in any practical sense, we believe in it like kids do Santa. It’s real when we can’t afford to eat or go to the doctor or buy a house. Though this map can’t give us an idea of the quality of life for those around the world, it’s interesting to think of the fairly cushy life in the US where someone dying of starvation is a freak occurrence as opposed to the lives of others in nations with far fewer resources.

You have to wonder how many of these countries allow big business to dictate the cost of the well being of their people, like the insurance industry seems to be doing in the U.S. If the U.S. is the richest nation around, it serves us to think about the cost that the people of the U.S. and other nations worldwide pay for that astonishing figure. Perhaps that’s a map for another day.

As Strange Maps states (I only used their information) this map is inaccurate as the numbers don’t reflect the per capita GDP, rather the gross GDP, and so the relative comfort and wealth of the people in any given country here as it compares to that of the US citizens of the corresponding state will bear no correlation.

So with much credit to those at Strange Maps, the following are the numbers and key to the map you see above.

California – France — $2,150, 000,000,000 (trillion) – #8
Texas – Canada — $1,080,000,000,000 (trillion) – #10
Florida – South Korea’s — $786,000,000,000 – #13
Illinois – Mexico — $741,000,000,000 – #14
New Jersey – Russia – $733,000,000,000 – #15
Ohio – Australia — $645,000,000,000 – #16
New York – Brazil — $621,000,000,000 – #17
Pennsylvania – Netherlands — $613,000,000,000 – #18
Georgia – Switzerland — $387,000,000,000 – #19
North Carolina – Sweden — $371,000,000,000 – #20
Massachusetts – Belgium — $368,000,000,000 – #21
Washington – Turkey — $358,000,000,000 – #22
Virginia – Austria — $309,000,000,000 – #24
Tennessee – Saudi Arabia – $286,000,000,000 – #25
Missouri – Poland — $265,000,000,000 – #26
Louisiana – Indonesia — $264,000,000,000 – #27
Minnesota – Norway — $262,000,000,000 – #28
Indiana – Denmark — $256,000,000,000 – #29
Connecticut – Greece — $222,000,000,000 – #30
Michigan – Argentina — $210,000,000,000 – #31
Nevada – Ireland — $203,000,000,000 – #32
Wisconsin – South Africa – $200,000,000,000 – #33
Arizona – Thailand – $197,000,000,000 – # 34
Colorado – Finland — $196,000,000,000 – #35
Alabama – Iran — $195,000,000,000 – #36
Maryland – Hong Kong — $187,000,000,000 – #37
Kentucky – Portugal — $177,000,000,000 – #38
Iowa – Venezuela — $148,000,000,000 – #39
Kansas – Malaysia — $132,000,000,000 – #40
Arkansas – Pakistan — $124,000,000,000 – #41
Oregon – Israel — $122,000,000,000 – #42
South Carolina – Singapore — $121,000,000,000 – #43
Nebraska – Czech Republic — $119,000,000,000 – #44
New Mexico – Hungary — $113,000,000,000 – #45
Mississippi – Chile — $100,000,000,000 – #48
DC – New Zealand — $99,000,000,000 – #49
Oklahoma – Philippines — $98,000,000,000 – #50
West Virginia – Algeria — $92,000,000,000 – #51
Hawaii – Nigeria — $83,000,000,000 – #53
Idaho – Ukraine — $81,000,000,000 – #54
Delaware – Romania — $79,000,000,000 – #55
Utah – Peru — $76,000,000,000 – #56
New Hampshire – Bangladesh — $69,000,000,000 – #57
Maine – Morocco — $57,000,000,000 – #59
Rhode Island – Vietnam — $48,000,000,000 – #61
South Dakota – Croatia — $37,000,000,000 – #66
Montana – Tunisia — $33,000,000,000 – #69
North Dakota – Ecuador — $32,000,000,000 – #70
Alaska – Belarus — $29 ,000,000,000 – #73
Vermont – Dominican Republic — $20,000,000,000 – #81
Wyoming – Uzbekistan — $11,000,000,000 – #101

Feature photo: quinn.anya

Ignorance is Bliss Photo and Feature Photo: Albie Girl

A mistake often made is attaching an emotional value to these and similar thoughts and having that emotion cloud objectivity to the point that the ideas are forgotten in the haze of anger, bitterness and defensiveness.

The following is a list (a very incomplete one) to get people thinking about white privilege as noted by a white girl who has spent most of her life in the U.S., so please forgive the U.S. bias. If you are non-white, please excuse the obvious direction of this article to whites.

________________________________________________________________

Have you ever been in a bookstore and noticed the “African American Literature” section?

Think about the implications of this.

Does it mean that Black American writers are not American writers of American fiction and literature?

What does this mean to white readers who can safely peruse the fiction section knowing their race is reflected in the selection, while perhaps the experience of Black Americans is not?

What does it mean for Black readers?

What does it mean to Black writers who hope to sell their work to a wide audience?

Does it mean that the experience of African Americans is not relevant to the typical, white fiction reader?

As a white person would you feel that you were conspicuous or out of place perusing the African American literature section?

Not all Bigotry is This Blatant
Photo: cometstarmoon

If so, how does this translate to the experience of a Black shopper?

What really are we supposed to glean from the fact that books are segregated in a bookstore?

Is the African American experience a niche market?

Are bookstores making a point of spotlighting the work of African American writers?

To what purpose?

Do they want to be seen as liberal and fair?

If so, why are they bringing such a conspicuous display of attention to what is usually such a small selection of books?

Do they want to make it easier for people interested in African American literature to find the relevant books?

What other “subsections” of fiction or literature are there in the book store?

Is it significant to you at all that you can choose to think about this or not to think about it and it will not necessarily have an effect on your life?

Can you continue to ignore race politics and theory without having it bother you one way or another?

Is that significant?

Can you think of ways in which other people might not have that luxury?

Is it a luxury?

Are Hughes or Hurston any less relevant to the lexicon than Hemmingway or Plath?

________________________________________________________________

Recognizing white privilege is an ongoing process that requires active participation by the person who wishes to recognize it.

You must think about your whiteness and its implications, read and talk about it or write about it to be aware of it and understand it.

Race is a touchy subject. Whites are often so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we claim not to see race or that it doesn’t matter to us. We claim not to perceive our own race. In order to avoid taking responsibility for our privilege, we deny that it exists.

Pretty convenient of us to deny race when for many people the day to day fact of their race is a relevant and important part of their identity. Yet we can claim not to perceive that part of the identity of other people with little or no consequences for our willful ignorance.

Playing dumb is a total cop out.

You know it’s true.

a S.H.A.R.P (Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice)
Photo: thivierr

Once you acknowledge that whites are recipients of advantages, you must acknowledge that other people are the recipients of disadvantages in a system that does not acknowledge an unfair bias and in many cases denies that a bias exists.

In a recent Newsweek article, white parents’ reluctance to talk about race was exposed as a crucial factor in the development of biased attitudes concerning race in young children. Certain parents who had signed up for a study about race, when told that they were to take a few minutes to discuss race with their children each day for its duration, chose instead to opt out of the study – the discussion was too uncomfortable.

Many seemed to think that discussing race was an inherently racist thing to do. That might be the truth if you hold racist attitudes. The fact that most of us do on one level or another and refuse to own up to it in order to stamp them out is willfully ignorant and destructive.

In this way, white children learn to shun the topic of race as shameful and it becomes the job of society at large to school the majority on how to think about race. It seems like too important of a topic to leave to chance or to heavily biased media outlets, but by and large that’s how it’s done.

These kids associate discussion of race with the fear implicit in their parents’ silence and by proxy begin to view race as a taboo topic, further surmising that there is something to be ashamed about. Too ashamed to talk about.

Ignorance continues to be propagated.

Other sites I’ve run across recently are Stuff White People Do, an article to do with the Palins as an example called “What is White Privilege?” from the Chicago Sun Times by Mary Mitchell, and the essay “White People Need to Acknowledge Benefits of Unearned Privilege” by Robert Jensen.

If you are interested in talking and reading more about anti-racism, find groups on the web like White Anti-racist Community Action Network and join up. Another really wonderful resource is the LiveJournal Community Debunking White, a community that does not have open automatic membership, but which you can still access without being a member.

When you start, it’s best to keep an open mind and just allow yourself to consider ideas that you may find foreign, disconcerting or even upsetting. Wait to fully consider ideas before jumping in with questions and opinions. You’ll find that questions you have have been answered before in many ways many times. Dig deep and you’ll surely find change within yourself.

Community Connection

Search for “white privilege” yourself in any search engine and see what you come up with. Post awesome and interesting finds in the comments field below.

On display in Museo de la Memoria (Museum of Memory) between March 23 and May 30, I made it to the opening on the eve of Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia (National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice), a holiday dedicated to the remembrance of the dictatorship and the atrocities and deaths attributable to it.

Family photos enlarged to the size of picture windows present a “before.” Before as in before the Argentinean dictatorship between the years of 1976 and 1983 that snuffed out the lives of as many as 30,000 people.

Above: Maria Irma Ferriera – missing since age 22, murdered January 7, 1977, in a family photograph from 1970.

To the right of each of these moments caught on film among family and friends are their modern counterparts. People who have aged in the interim, the ones who remain, recreate each scene under the careful direction of photographer Gustavo Germano.

Husbands, wives, parents, and children who once were there leave haunting spaces in the images. The gravity of the loss is apparent in the eyes of those in the enormous, full color prints. Many of the subjects gaze directly into the camera with sobering expressions.

The disappeared were from all walks of life. Children were taken from mothers who were suspected of having subversive views – the mothers killed and the children given to the military elite.

The following are some photographs I took of the exhibition along with translations from the program. The missing are named with their age at the time of their disappearance or murder.

María del Carmen Fettolini (age 29)
María Eugenia Amestoy (age 5)
Fernanado Amestoy (age 3)

(in this photo, you can see Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo viewing the work)

María del Carmen was born in 1947 in Nogoyá. Childhood sweetheart and wife of Omar Dario Amestoy, she was a kindergarten teacher in a Catholic school in Nogoyá.

At the age of 29, María del Carmen was brutally assassinated by Army forces and Federal Police along with her husband, Omar Dario Amestoy, and their small children, María Eugenia and Fernando. At six in the morning, tanks and trucks surrounded their house at 668 Justo Street while they slept.

Cars, submachine guns, shouts, grenades, tear gas. María del Carmen, Omar, and their friend Ana María Granada had no means of defending themselves. They tried to hide the children. The adults died riddled with bullets. The children, María Eugenia and Fernando, were asphyxiated by gas. Five month old Manuel, son of Ana María Granada, hidden in a blanket inside a wardrobe, was the only survivor. He recovered his identity in 1995.

In this 1974 photograph, María del Carmen on the right smiles next to her mother in law, Aurora Yturbe, her cousin Martín and her two children, María Eugenia and Fernando. Sunday lunch with the in-laws.

As of March 2009, the families continue to seek justice.

Orlando René Méndez (age 29)
Leticia Margarita Oliva (age 30)

Orlando René was born in San Salvador (Entre Rios) November 10, 1946. Leticia Margarita Oliva was born in Plaza Huincul (Neuquén) August 26, 1948. They were married in April 1970. Their only child, Laura, was born five years later.

Orlando “Toto” worked in an air conditioner factory and was a guerrilla soldier. On October 21, 1976, he was arrested during a meeting with this organization. His 11-month old daughter was with him. They were both transferred to the Navy Mechanics School. Orlando arrived dead.

María Álvarez, also detained there, looked after the baby for several hours. By night, the child was abandoned at an orphanage where, after several days of searching, her mother was found and they were reunited.

After the arrest and murder of her husband, Leticia abandoned activism and moved to another city. December 27, 1978, two years after Orlando’s arrest, an armed commando group invaded her home.

Three year old Laura was in the house with her babysitter. The soldiers waited six hours for Leticia to return from the clinic where she worked. As soon as she entered, they blindfolded her, beat her, and took her away. This is the last image Laura would ever have of her mother, who she would never see again.

In the photograph, Orlando and Leticia with Laura in the house of her grandparents days before the state strike of March 24, 1976.

As of March 29, 2009 Orlando and Leticia are still missing.

Eduardo Raúl Germano (age 18)

Eduardo Raúl was born February 20, 1958 in Villaguay. The oldest of four brothers, at 16 he was elected president of La Salle Student Center and started an activist group.

In July, 1976, he was detained nine days in the hidden detention center in Paraná City Army Squadron Communication Center (CCD). Once freed, he moved to Rosario where he lived in hiding. On December 17, 1976, he was arrested once again, this time by the Argentinean Army and Santa Fe Province Police.

For days he was tortured in the CCD, known as “El Pozo,” or the hole. Investigations following the dictatorship and verified recently by the Museum of the Memory in Rosario reveal that Germano was murdered December 23, 1976.

Rosario Chief of Police, Augustín Feced, organized a simulated terrorist attack in the Fisherton neighborhood to blow up the tortured bodies of Eduardo and his girlfriend. Eduardo “el Mencho” or “the Mensch,” was buried January 4, 1977 in an unmarked grave at La Piedad Cemetery, which was later turned into a mass reliquary.

In the photograph: 1969. The family goes on vacation to Uruguay. The Argentinean police demand an identity photo of the children before permitting them to cross the border. The photo was taken in a studio in a nearby town.

As of March 2009, Eduardo is still missing.

The artist is the subject on the left of each photo here.

Visit Germano’s website to see more photos. Even if you can’t speak or understand Spanish, these photos need no translation.