In The Year Of 2008

It was 2008 when Obama got elected that year and I was working at a soup kitchen in Jersey City, at 7am, on the last Saturday of the month.  Standing out in the cold, there were a line of people out the door, white, black, green and yellow...and as they stood waiting for food, they looked just like you and me...by the end of the meal, I started cleaning up and folding tables, putting chairs away...a man came to me and said "thank you for coming, I will fold this table for you", and another man stood up and said "I will help him", a third man "I will fold the chairs", a fourth "I will sweep the floor" and a fifth rose from his seat and said "This is what President Obama said we should do, we have to help each other, work as a team, work together". And as I stood back, I realized I was baring witness to a movement.

Now here we are, 2012 an election year and those same people are still standing in line.  So what happens now?  Who’s promises are we listening too? Unemployment has never been so bad, foreclosures are at an all time high, the farmers are experiencing one of the worst droughts of the century and the banks can’t be trusted.  Our health insurance has sky rocketed, for those who have it and for those who don’t, you will die.  Our children are running wild and babies are having babies in the street.  Our taxes are over the top and our politicians keep making broken promises, but it’s an election year in 2012 and the same people are still standing in line.

Unchie

My Great Grandmother Unchie was five years old during the Massacre of Wounded Knee that occurred on December 29, 1891. She survived that tragedy and because of that i am writing you today. She use to say "it only takes a little bit of blood to make a difference."   What did she actually mean by that? What was the difference she was talking about I wonder? Was it being Indian, or was it being human? She had witnessed the slaughter of her people, survived against all odds, yet she saw humanity in the face of hatred. My grandmother saw the world as a whole, not segregated  broken pieces of white, black, brown and yellow stones, but the sum of the whole, and  because of that she lived...

                                                   My father Louis Larvie Snyder with Unchie

Unchie bore four children, two girls, my grandmother Alice, Aunt Frieda, and my two great uncles Don, otherwise know as Little Rabbit, and my uncle Doug the matriarch of the family. They had fought in WWII, and outlived most of the men on Orange Beach in Normandie, France. How had that come full circle? The 7th Calvary had killed the Oglala's in an attempt to control the land, now my uncles were holding the rifles, fighting a war that wasn't theirs.

Lost City Sparkle

Lost City Sparkle

Lost city sparkle, Lakota drum beware,

Black hills climbing spirits on the prowl.

Beadhill mountain on the rise.           

Red Shirt table talking,

Musket in his hand

Bullet in my chest, dead do cry.

Buried warriors watch the underground .

Calling, calling high above the clouds
Fallen children cry no more.

Crazy horse mountain

Right beyond that door.

White man keeping black

Gold seeping, red wall down,

Wachitu, wachitu, on a death calling river.
Birds are caustic, no word to sound

Shattered wing eagles, they can’t fly.
Ink layered mosaic across the

Ocean bed, manic spilling,
Machine, machine, machine is straight ahead.

Crude gushing oil all around the spool,
Spigot on the ground, the box top is leaking.

Massive grave bleeding whales come to shore,

White man money
Today we all weep once more...

Abuse

So I’m in BJ’s the other day, strolling through the aisles, thinking, it’s only me how much pasta can I buy? Never the less, I did pick up a few things.  As I’m sipping on my free sample of the new Welch’s fruit punch, being demonstrated by Mrs. Lovely Juanita, I hear a baby crying, a mother yelling and an element of friction I cannot shake.  As I turn, I see a mother pulling her child out of the shopping cart and his leg is caught on the strap.  I yell out, “his leg, his leg, be careful with his leg!”.  She turns vehemently with her beady eyes and yells, "I KNOW, mind your own business!" I said, “You’re a little rough”. She now begins to scream at the top of her lungs telling me how f&$%$@% annoying I am, and to shut up.  In a very calm voice I said, “You are still too rough”.  Now, the husband begins to chime in, and starts telling me at the top of his lungs to call the cops, all in front of these two babies.  I just stood there and said nothing. Now, people started to stop and watch these parents behave like wild animals in the street, scavenging, defending a position they knew nothing about. “Mind your own business!" she yells out.  "When you mistreat your child", I responded, "it becomes everybody's business!”

What would you have done?

Homeless

Homeless     This morning, on my way to work (after my one hour elliptical workout from 5-6am) at 7:30am, I was parking my car and had wrapped up a call with my friend; I’m walking down the hill on 165th St. and Washington Heights when, suddenly, I hear a woman screaming! I can see a homeless woman from the back as her cart, filled with possessions, stand alongside the curb. I thought it was two homeless people fighting in the
 street, but as I got closer I can see that the woman who is screaming works at Columbia, and she was clutching her purse, trying to tear it from the grasp of the other woman! I immediately walked towards the both of them and as they separate, I walk in between them and proceed to act a little crazy distracting the homeless woman from approaching Claire, the woman from Columbia. So I stand out there, in the street, turn to the homeless woman and say flaring my arms, “What’s going on?!" Enough, that’s enough, time to go now” and the homeless woman starts to tell me how Claire tried to take her bag. I said “OK, OK, it’s over, enough, let’s go, let’s go!” I walk up to Claire, and ask her if she's alright.  “She tried to steal my bag, she’s crazy!” she said. I told her, “come I will walk with you, forget her- imagine how she feels!" "What department are you from", I inquired.  “Transplant,” she replied.  "Dr. Jean Emond?" I asked, now interested.  I remembered how he was one of the best liver transplant specialist in the country.  So we proceed to walk together down the hill and into the hospital at CUMC. Our haven of safety, our house of knowledge, the sanctuary that feeds our very lives. I turned to her and said “you are going to be alright, just shake it off-because in the grand scheme of things, we are the lucky ones…" she went her way, and I went mine.

And how was your morning?