Walking in the Darwinian Present

I take a walk from our place on Milpas to State Street to buy some bows so my wife can finish up the Christmas wrapping. Evening is coming and the mountains wear a rosy shawl and the sky is a lovely dark blue. I am wearing a t-shirt and shorts. The day has been warm, nearly 80 degrees – so much for winter and a white Christmas. In front of the museum of art a phalanx of homeless people are camped on stone benches; one guy strums a guitar. Across the street in front of Old Navy a woman has commandeered a wooden bench and piled it with her belongings and covered herself with blankets. Shoppers avert their eyes from her as they pass.

Earlier in the day I read a report that the Dow Jones topped 18,000 for the first time in history. Investors were said to be giddy, and the business media, as always, conflated the rise of the stock market with the health of the American economy, a false claim, but who’s checking? For ordinary people who work for wages, the economy hasn’t recovered from where it was in 2008, but we don’t talk much about this now, just like we don’t talk about the threat of climate change or the Ebola outbreak. Our media machine is brilliant at selecting what to report and what to leave out, what to tell us, what to keep from us; the machine frames every story within acceptable dimensions: the US only deploys military force in righteous causes; the free market economy equals personal freedom; capitalism is essential to democracy – myths and lies to whitewash the brutality of our Darwinian present. Damn fine time to be a robber baron in this age of inequality, where wholesale larceny goes unpunished.

I go into CVS, find a box of bows, and get in the checkout line behind a woman wearing saggy sweatpants and funky shoes; her ankles are swollen. The carpet is soiled and stained. The female checker is chubby and looks bored. Back out on the sidewalk a kid tries to slip a card in my hand advertising a Christmas concert sponsored by a church. I pass. The woman on the bench has been joined by another woman and a man in a wheelchair, and she is telling them about something that cost $500 a night, but the man is arguing that she has it wrong, that it is $500 a month not a night. The woman holds her ground. “Martin,” she says, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” The new woman is barefoot and her feet are grimy.

Despair in a happy time, want and plenty side by side, light and shadow, storefronts aglow, voices from the restaurant on the corner; a homeless troubadour naps on a bed of white stone. Is this the life he chose to live, or did forces beyond his control overwhelm him? What mistakes or missteps led him here? His guitar case is scuffed and dented. I walk on, turn east on Anapamu, and head home in the deepening twilight.