Thursday, January 12, 2017

How can we end the suffering of the homeless

I am not a socialist, nor have left-wing vision of world economy. I don't subscribe to any communist, Marxist or liberal economic views. I simply lack the education to qualify me to involve myself in any conversation in that field. The only conversation I was part of was when a friend of mine, who was doing his PhD project on labor market, and we used to discuss labor market here and there in the world. I was much of listener actually, rather than active participant in the conversation.

However, it doesn't need an expert in economy, nor in politics, or any field in that matter, to realize the irony in having more than 15 people sleeping homeless in snowing night with freezing temp that went down to -9, under a tower that is worth billions of dollars. It doesn't even require any level of education to realize that there is something very wrong in this view.

I am not an idealist, but something tells me that it is wrong and quite beastly ironic to organize a convention that may have cost each of the more 500 scholar attending at least 500 dollars to attend (some have paid between 1000-1500), to take part and participate in a conversation about crossing borders, while tens of people live homeless in their own city under the blizzard of Philadelphia nights.

Last week I went to Philadelphia to attend the MLA convention 2017. When the taxi took me from the airport to the apartment I shared with my colleagues from Kings, I was impressed all the way with the tall buildings, the fancy lightening of the towers. It seemed to me a city for the rich. There was the Marriott, with at least 130 $ per night, and there was Macy's with its fancy prices. The convention center where most of the sessions took place was quite elegant and expensive place. But the night came, and in our way back to where we enjoyed the warmth of hot drinks in luxurious beds, the homeless retired to their usual spots under the tall buildings, the bridges and any structure with some shade to hide away from the snow storm. The scene was particularly disturbing. As a group of highly educated academics, most of us enjoy well-paid jobs, houses, and cars, we spent all day engaging in conversations about people who were dispersed in the city unnoticed, waiting for the night to fall, so they could retire back to their usual spots.

One of the panels made the irony more pressing. A panel that theorize on the suffering of refugees, while some of these homeless who sleep underneath the building were the refugees we were discussing their pain. How the panel helped? how our convention helped? We spent four days in that huge city, from Thursday to Sunday. By Monday, we all retreated back to our comfortable places in different cities and different worlds, unconcerned but about the papers we have presented, whether we made good impressions, whether our presentations would help us secure better-paid jobs! Many of us tried their best to challenge the presentations they attended, engaging in a game of "who is the smartest now!", unaware that the real challenge for whatever we do, say, or write, is those people who fell out of the ship, and we were too busy with our selfishness to notice their cries for help.

What is the use of ecocriticism, what is the use of a theory and discussion of empathy, and of finally naming our contemporary era as the anthropocene, what is the use of all the intellectual endeavors we engage in, starting from our graduate studies till each one of us enjoys being called a doctor, if our brains can't solve the problems of the homeless, of the fleeing refugees, and the millions of people who live under poverty lines?

We go about using every cell in our active brains to discover the history of humanity, past and future, horizontally and vertically. We killed all kinds of gods and made jokes of all the myths that defined our universe. However, even the best mind of minds failed to end the real problems of our existing reality, or probably we haven't been concerned enough about them?

Our words, our intellectual talents, turn hallow and useless for the homeless in these cold nights in Philadelphia as the thin sheets they were using to protect themselves from the snow storm. The sight of them surrendering to the snow storm, hoping to wake up alive the next day, mocked desperately whatever smartness we think we have.

Nadia  

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