78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Restoration
2005-02-15   2:25 p.m.

We sit high in the midst of urban restoration projects around here right now; I suppose new construction and plans for malls/stadiums/arenas/
Bohemian coffee shops are supposed to "uplift" otherwise questionable areas and offer a solution to the very real problems of poverty that are endemic to the inner cities that surround NYC. I gotta say, though, I really laugh out loud every time I hear some local journalist say "Xanadu" on the radio.

This is the name they've given to the gigundo shopping plaza (or whatever it is) that they're building not to far from where I live. But wasn't that also the name of some crappy seventies roller-disco movie in which Oliva Newton John's character was made of light, or something?

Regardless, it is sort of amusing to watch big important people with tons of money bang their heads against the wall, hoping in vain that they can come up with the plan to turn Newark or Paterson, NJ neighborhoods into another East Village. It's not so amusing, though, when you realize that their plan for "improvement" often includes moving people of color out, and moving more white people in. It also isn't amusing to realize that the money supposedly being "invested into the city" really isn't, as those who live outside of the city - the owners of the malls/stadiums/etc., are the ones who will be profiting most from the new constructions. And as for "job creation" - people in the inner city need jobs that provide mobility, not another slew of opportunities to mop floors and clean up parking lots for $5.50/hr. Hoo-ray.

So I watch each day as new constructions go up; I drive in, drive out, and get annoyed that in just a few short months, driving and parking will become even more of a frustrating project than it already is. Feh.

My brother moved into his sparkly new house over the weekend. Ok, so it's not sparkly - but it's a house. It needs lots o' work, but that's what little sisters (not to mention their husbands) with paint scrapers, hammers, and endurance are for. I missed part of day one of the move-in, as I was attending my monthly NOW meeting. When I finally turned up to help, no one seemed to care that I was so late. "You didn't get arrested or anything again, did you?" my brother asked when I walked in the door. "No," I said, "we were just talking in someone's living room this time," I said. He seemed disappointed, but then handed me a ream of carcinogen-laden dusty wallpaper that he'd just ripped down.

This, along with a trip into Manhattan to go shopping, was my weekend. No dramatic arrests, no one chaining themselves to buildings in protest, no fun fights or social happenings. Just plenty of domesticity - but the kind where you stand on ladders and take rusty old awnings off the side of the house, not the kind where you knit things and bake brownies. I'm not terribly good at either of those things.

We did meet up with the ex-bf this weekend at the Loop, where I also happened to run into two raging socialist friends from Grad school. I love/hate that place for this very reason; it's impossible to go there and not see someone I know. And lately those someones are becoming more and more obscure. Anyway, Myke humored me when I asked him to "break down" in a lawyerly way, perhaps, Bush's social security agenda. Part of the work I do with NOW, you see, is explaining political changes to women who wouldn't otherwise understand them because of a language barrier or lack of educated understanding of how our government systems work. But when the explain-er herself doesn't understand, the explain-ee is totally screwed.

I was relieved for personal reasons when Myke reinforced what other people had told me: typical of Bush, we've only heard 25% of the Grand Plan. How this proposed privatization will take place, and how these "investment opportunities" will be made accessible to us is unclear. My relief with this came in my understanding that it wasn't just me who felt confused, but everyone. But beyond that fast relief, I'm still frustrated and frightened. Any semblance of a social welfare system we have left nowadays has been repeatedly attacked by Republicans, so on the one hand, this is nothing new. But put unflinching arrogance in power -put people who believe so much in their own righteousness that they refuse to entertain any sort of compromise, and we could all be in big, big trouble.

The saddest thing about the entire Enron scandal was how the blatant thievery bankrupted people's retirement accounts. Would this happen with social security? Do we really want to stake our money on Haliburton? Will we have no choice? I'm anxious to find out what will become of an already messy system; I understand that it needs some work, but I don't believe that it will disappear by 2015, or whatever the random date that Bush chose to use in his State of the Union address. I'm skeptical of the truth behind that statement, since those conservatives before him said the exact same thing about 1986. It's just too bad that what we stabilized and were able to do to create a surplus in the mid-90s has been destroyed by a few greedy white men.

I'm off - it's finally nice enough to go swimming again here. I can understand that this makes no sense, since I swim indoors in a heated pool; this is something I should be able to do all year long. But something just really sucks about coming out of the building when you've just been all wet for 30 minutes and it's absolutely freezing. So yay - it's swimming weather again. Sort of. And yay, Globe Trekker is on tonight!

xo