A sobering experience
I grew up in the suburbs. Occasionally, I would venture into D.C. after dark, sometimes even to the more sketchy neighborhoods, if it meant getting to a great party at Velvet. But I’ve really never spent any significant amount of time in an urban environment. Just living in this Brooklyn neighborhood has been an eye-opening experience over the last two weeks. However, I was not prepared for what I saw last night.I had gone to a happy hour in Union Square with Lisa and Jon, and was heading home on the 4 5 at around 9:30pm. I had to wait for about 15 minutes at a station in Brooklyn. While I was sitting on the bench, a man sat a bag in the seat next to me. It was clear plastic, and inside was one of those “hazardous medical waste” containers (the ones I’m always sure contain lanced tumors and bloody amputated arms – too many horror movies, I know). Anyway, the only relevance of the bag was that it made me take notice of the man who had been carrying it. He was maybe 27 or 28, wearing a wife-beater t-shirt and jeans, shaved head, and had a brand new, still bleeding swastika tattoo on his arm. I then noticed nearby there was a woman with a child. The boy was maybe 4 years old, and smiling and laughing. His mother was absolutely out of her mind on drugs. She had dirt under her fingernails and sores all over her arms, not to mention track marks from whatever needles she had been putting in them. She kept stumbling around the subway platform, pulling and pushing the child around with her, yelling at him if he got distracted and stood still for too long. Well, it didn’t take long to figure out that this little boy’s father was the Nazi shithead with the bag next to me. The woman kind of lazily followed him around on the platform. The man occasionally would stop walking and start angrily punching the concrete pylon like he was boxing.
I felt sad, scared, and really pissed at the same time. The saddest part was knowing that this little 4 year old boy was probably destined to have just as fucked-up a life as his parents obviously did. His father would teach him intolerance, and his mother would teach him that it's okay to solve problems by injecting shit into your arm. It was a big dose of reality for me, realizing that this stuff not only exists, but for the first time I am in extremely close proximity to it. I don’t think that was the last time I will see something like that. It does a lot to jolt you out of the little middle class bubble you live in, and makes you realize that there’s a reason people form organizations and programs to help lower income people and families break the cycle that causes their children and their children’s children to live this destructive lifestyle. I’ve never felt more content with my liberal political position, realizing the importance of helping people to help themselves through programs sponsored using government money. It’s important, and after seeing something like that last night, I can’t think of anything more important.
posted by Colleen @ 6:53 AM
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