Struggling And Striving

One of life's amusing incongruities is that in the very same downtown area of a city one may find facilities such as Starbucks where people sit for hours gazing at their opened lap tops, or out the window in contemplation of who knows what, all very respectable activity upon which passersby glance approvingly if some times with amusement whereas over in a nearby park sit a body of persons, their dogs and backpacks at their feet, talking with one another or staring vacantly into space.  These are the homeless whose presence excite the most extreme reactions from almost everyone who comes that way.  I know that I myself am fearful, somehow frightened of their seeming lack of purpose and thus of control, their indifference to life's struggle as it is structured in the bourgeois world.  That many of them are addicts and thus struggling what we now know to be a disease does not increase my compassion; all I can see is "waste."  Walking into San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and stepping over the persons lounging with their pets on the sidewalks and verges of the entrance area is almost too terrifying for me.  I was interested to read in the Times yesterday about the chain fence forming an impassable border between an area of New Haven which offers public housing and the affluent suburb of Hamden.  The housing is largely filled with black persons and the fence is presented as an element of a racial divide, but interviews with middle class black residents of Hamden showed that they, too, want the fence kept intact.  They spoke in terms of handouts, public housing, the usual, but behind it lies the very real fear of being tainted by persons who haven't the get up and go, gave up the race.  I remember living in the historically Jewish suburb Brookline Massachusetts to which community we moved our family when I came back east to teach on the theory that living among so many Jews would naturally improve their chances for doing well in school.  And yes, the pressure upon the young in that community to do well, succeed enough to make it into one of the Ivy League universities was overwhelming.  I think one can see the same sort of thing at play in the charter schools of Harlem run by the very energetic and enterprising Eva Moskowitz who has an army camp like atmosphere and an energetic discipline for a school full of low income black Harlem youngsters.  To my mind Ms. Moskowitz is trying to impose middle class Jewish anxiety and discipline upon a group who had traditionally been unaware of that kind of non stop desperate struggle.  She is wildly succeeding, the parents love her--who knows if the kids do?-- but in four years when it is time to be accepted to college we shall know how it all pays out.  I quite forgot to mention the genteel indolent, those folks living on trust funds, whose glide through life is quiet, unchallenged and serene, if sometimes tinged with a mysterious wonder at the meaninglessness of it all.