Sherry Chandler

Have the bombers turned into butterflies yet?

Today is my 37^th wedding anniversary, and we are approaching the 40^th anniversary of Woodstock. I’m sure we’re in for a spate of nostalgia and re-assessment. For myself, I’m just sort of stunned that 40 years can go by so quickly. And that the ideals of the nation could have been undermined so totally in those short 40 years.

What I would ask you to look at, 42 years after the Summer of Love, is this Barbara Ehrenreich op-ed in the NYTimes, Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor:

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.

The report lists America’s 10 “meanest” cities — the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco — but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

Please note, by the way, that San Francisco is now one of the 10 meanest cities. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair but don’t sit on the sidewalk.

The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.

These laws against poverty are another facet of our tendency to let prisons “solve” our social problems and so we set up a vicious cycle, create an underclass:

If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them.

. . .

The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

And talk about regressive taxation:

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy.

Is this the kind of country we want to be? Is this the kind of country that will stand as a “city on the hill” to lead the world toward democracy? A country where empathy is considered shameful in a judge? Where healthcare for all is somehow both Socialist and Fascist?* A country where Les Misérables is acted out on the streets while it’s acted out on the stage?

I was not at Woodstock, would not have gone if I could have gone. I’m a War Baby, not a Baby Boomer.

But I would say we have rather seriously failed to find our way back to the garden.

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*See Frank Rich today for the role of lobbyists in the townhall riots and the healthcare “debate” in general.

It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.