A guide to your #DCision14 city-wide candidates

I don’t believe that the race for mayor has to be seen as a two-way race. I also believe that regardless of who wins, the greatest political change often happens between elections. My thoughts on the mayoral race are below, but I’m going to start with a story about the at-large race between Anita Bonds and Nate Bennett-Fleming, among the easiest city-wide decisions to make.

Last year when Council Chair Kwame “Fully Loaded” Brown was deposed by scandal and Council Member Phil Mendelson took his place as chair, the DC Democratic State Committee chose its own chair of six years, Anita Bonds, to fill Mendelson’s At-Large seat – without an election. Bonds also happened to be an executive at Fort Myer Construction, a well-connected contractor that does tens of millions of dollars worth of deals with the city each year. At the time, the 82-member DC Democratic State Committee that put Bonds in office was illegitimately constituted, as it had canceled an election for the city to choose its membership and its members were already overstaying their terms.

More on that soon. After being appointed to the Council, Bonds ran several months later in a special election – now as the incumbent, with all the benefits that entails – and narrowly beat Elissa Silverman, a progressive, wonky candidate running with no corporate contributions but with a strong grassroots base.

At the time, Bonds said, “I think this is some hard work that needs to be done,” and “I don’t want to do it unless you can make a difference.” Yet fifteen months later, she has led just one notable piece of legislation, albeit a respectable one that improves housing affordability for long-time resident senior citizens.

One good bill in fifteen months? We should expect more.

“Expect more” – that happens to be the campaign slogan of Bonds’ challenger Nate Bennett-Fleming, a Ward 8-to Harvard Kennedy School-to UC Berkeley Law School whiz with an encyclopedic policy agenda that reaches a level of detail and knowledge all candidates should aspire to. Nate is currently DC’s shadow representative, and from all accounts he has worked hard in the thankless, unpaid position to lobby Congress for DC statehood.

The John A. Wilson Building, at 14th and E Sts NW, where the DC Council and the mayor’s offices are. Visit your elected representatives and testify there! (Photo credit: Adam Fagen, Flickr)

Though the 29-year-old Nate did a short stint at Goldman Sachs, he would be one of the most progressive council members. He supports a $12.50 minimum wage, indexed to inflation, and talks about issues like affordable housing, creation of good jobs, education, campaign finance, rehabilitative justice and more, with a unique energy and understanding.

The At-Large race presents an incredible contrast between the young, progressive, energetic, knowledgeable Bennett-Fleming and the 68-year-old establishment appointee who rarely takes stands (though she recently made the retrograde, life-endangering call for a moratorium on bike lanes in certain places). As I make this endorsement I also have to note that it’s a problem that there are only four women to nine men on the Council. Nevertheless…

Vote for Nate Bennett-Fleming.

Back to the Democratic State Committee for a moment. Remember how its members appointed Bonds to the Council while overstaying their terms? Two years past their legal welcome, they are now finally facing re-election on Tuesday, April 1^st. Vote them out.

Vote for The Rent Is Too Darn High slate.

The slate is highly diverse in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, and type of political experience – it’s also openly committed to making DC a more equal place for all. Its candidate for National Committeewoman, for example, is Nikki Lewis, a stalwart in DC’s local workers’ advocacy scene as executive director of DC Jobs With Justice. With the Jeffrey Thompson case and future perennial scandals likely to make heads roll, let’s have a party we can trust making replacement appointments to the council if the need arises.

 

Now for the mayoral race.

The Thompson allegations have made Mayor Vince Gray an easy target for many voters, who assume they should turn to Council Member Muriel Bowser as the alternative, based on a few small-sample-size polls portraying it as a two-person race, including a Washington City Paper one that only surveyed people with landlines.

Gray’s illegal shadow funding of his previous campaign is bad, but it shouldn’t completely overshadow the candidates’ policy positions or campaign decisions. Gray’s recent support for affordable housing (thanks to hard work by advocates) is laudable, but his past failures on the issue have helped lead to the current homelessness crisis, which he is also handling poorly. Gray’s choice for campaign manager, Chuck Thies, is a knowledgeable but conservative-leaning flack who also leaves a bad taste in the mouth for his bulldog, wannabe Rahm Emmanuel style – in a recent City Paper story he intimated that he doesn’t mind misleading voters who haven’t informed themselves enough. Gray has been better on progressive taxation than Bowser, who can’t ask for more money from the wealthy but can increase Metro fares for the working and middle class (though she has also passed legislation to subsidize DC students’ bus rides). Gray also has initiated groundbreaking programs for transgender Washingtonians, and got the highest possible rating from the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, followed closely by Wells. But his positions on workers’ issues leave much to be desired. Under his watch, conditions at the DC Jail deteriorated to crisis conditions, policing under his administration has been disturbingly racist, and criminal justice advocates tell me he leaves much to be desired in support for returning citizens. Overall there’s little to suggest he’s looking out for the most vulnerable Washingtonians as the city develops and displaces.

Meanwhile, Bowser, though considered by many the only counter to Gray, is not a change I can believe in.

The success of Muriel Bowser seems owed to a long and well-organized campaign backed by a lot of (corporate) money, a growing anti-Gray sentiment, and perhaps also the propensity of media to leap upon two-way race narratives. She has a very well organized campaign, but a disastrously thin legislative record and a scarily vague set of values and agenda items beyond slogans like “All 8 Wards” and “Alice Deal for all.” She has a lot of enthusiastic supporters, but I’ve asked numerous times in a variety of forums for substantive policy reasons why they support her, and never been able to get a response.

The Large Retailer Accountability Act (LRAA), which would have made Walmart pay its employees $12.50 an hour in DC, was an illuminating moment for many. Bowser steadfastly opposed it, reneging on previous statements of hers that she would ensure good pay at the stores, after she received fundraising support from Walmart.

What happened after the LRAA failed spoke volumes. While Council Members Vincent Orange (who had led on LRAA) and Tommy Wells (who had voted against it despite concerted campaigns to swing his vote) proposed city-wide minimum wages of $12.50 and $10.25 per hour respectively, Mayor Gray echoed the DC Chamber of Commerce’s $10 per hour proposal (though he was to the right of the Chamber on whether to index it to inflation) and Bowser proposed… wait for it… a commission to do a study on what impacts a minimum wage increase would have on the city.

DC is now set to have the highest minimum wage in the country, $11.50 per hour, set to rise with inflation, by 2016 – it will begin a series of increases toward that in July. Under Bowser’s plan however, the low-wage workers of one of the most unequal cities in the country would still be waiting for experts to tell them what a minimum wage increase would do.

I’m generally uninspired by the mayoral candidate field. But my pick for mayor – and some of my activist friends will give me an earful for this – is Ward 6 Council Member Tommy Wells. Wells killed his opportunity to be the undisputed candidate of the left in DC when he refused to vote for the LRAA, arguably spelling its death. But he has also done some good things and, polling in third (and, in this 4,000 person poll, in first) he’s still the only progressive candidate with any chance of winning.

After the LRAA, Council Members Orange and Mendelson were the best on pushing a city-wide minimum wage; Tommy was its greatest advocate right behind them. He can rightfully take credit for winning a significant wage increase for tens of thousands of workers (though even at $11.50 it still won’t be a true living wage). Tommy was also one of the most supportive council members of a campaign I took part in to extend paid sick days coverage to restaurant workers.

As chair of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, Tommy has been instrumental in passing marijuana decriminalization (though amendments by Vincent Orange and Mendelson will weaken its benefits for the poor and people of color). And he has been extremely supportive of a campaign I’m organizing to get a library at the DC Jail. Full disclosure: Tommy is the council member I’ve had by far the most interaction with, though we certainly don’t agree on everything. He seems to have young white voters as a core constituency and doesn’t poll very well with black voters, which is problematic in what it could mean for gentrification if he were to be elected and become DC’s first white mayor.

On ethics issues, Tommy is taking the rare stand of running without corporate contributions. I think that’s admirable and a stand that should be rewarded, though there are some caveats – wealthy people can still make significant contributions as people rather than as businesses. Also, as Marion Barry has pointed out, candidates with largely white and affluent bases can better afford to rely on individual donations than can candidates representing people with less disposable income.

Speaking of ethics, let’s talk about the ethics bill Muriel Bowser champions as one of her biggest legislative accomplishments (when she’s not asking what a legislative record has to do with being qualified for mayor, anyway). Well, the Sunlight Foundation wrote that the bill “takes some steps to follow best practices in municipal ethics, but is overly reactive to recent scandals, contains significant loopholes, has relatively weak enforcement and punitive powers, and ignores or passes the buck on some much needed reforms.” Meanwhile in the final days of the primary Bowser is raking in money from big developers, real estate firms and other businesses, including ones facing major criticisms from community advocates and unions.

At a recent Washington City Paper mayoral forum, Tommy Wells asked Bowser why she refused to support an amendment that would simply require contractors to check a box on a form saying whether they had donated to candidates or officials, who might be deciding on whether to give those companies big contracts. Bowser responded by simply repeating the line that it was a “comprehensive” ethics bill. Sorry, but that’s not a real response.

Wells ended up being the only council member to vote against the bill, saying it was too weak to support. He was also removed from his post as chair of the Committee on Public Works and Transportation by Chairman-at-the-time Kwame Brown for publishing a report on Brown’s “fully loaded” Lincoln Navigator scandal instead of burying the issue of Brown’s misuse of public money.

Bowser is very well informed on the city’s issues; her statements in interviews and in her response to the State of the District are evidence of that. Her organizational and management skills are made clear by the success of her campaign. But to what end? Her combination of conservative votes and thin legislative record after seven years on the council bode poorly. Many voters may want a change from Mayor Gray – but a change to what? It’s unclear with Bowser, but it’s unlikely to be in progressive directions.

Wells gives progressives the best chance to have a friend in the mayor’s office, but as always, continued scrutiny and advocacy is the only way to guarantee results.

 

Also, Phil Mendelson is running, relatively uncontested, for re-election as council chair – vote for Mendelson, a critical leader in the recent paid sick days and minimum wage victories, and often a refreshing voice of calm and reason on the council.

A few words on other mayoral candidates people are considering.

Vincent Orange: His leadership on LRAA, the city-wide minimum wage, and paid sick days has been fantastic, and he should be the people’s champ candidate right now. But he has an ideologically inconsistent record over his career (he along with Bowser has voted against making the tax code more progressive), and his campaigning skills don’t quite match his recent progressive bona fides – he has no chance of winning. Also, his bizarre, pipe dream plan for an RFK Stadium renovation including an indoor water park and a museum honoring DC golf is intriguing in a Sim City way, but would exacerbate gentrification and likely be a massive public-to-private transfer of wealth, and is just not very mayoral.

Andy Shallal: I agree with his progressive values and I love Busboys and Poets, but a few things. Despite running as a progressive and stumping hard on his support for paid sick days as a restaurant employer who has long provided them, I have heard very mixed things about how well his employees are treated. I also see some hypocrisy in a man worth $15 million positioning himself as a man of the people, and as the owner of an original highbrow 14^th Street restaurant positioning himself as a critic of gentrification. Lastly, I definitely think there’s value to outsider candidates and the critiques they bring to the conversation, but at the same time it feels wrong for someone with so little government experience to run for a position that demands such complex understanding and control of the system. His campaign has never felt completely serious to me. And I think outsider, very long-shot candidates contribute much more to the city when they use their seat at the debates to hammer home a specific policy reform, as Paul Zukerberg very successfully did with his advocacy for marijuana decriminalization while running at-large last year.

Jack Evans: A seemingly well-intentioned man with a lot of experience on the council, but who talks a lot about turning all of DC into 14^th Street (read: rampant gentrification), has a second job as a lobbyist that seemingly presents conflicts of interest and pays him more than his council job does, and is out of touch enough to have called his Georgetown neighborhood “inner-city.”

 

All that being said, someone will become the Democratic candidate for mayor with probably no more than 25-40 percent of the vote, of the less than 50 percent of residents who turn out to the polls.

This is a disgrace in the political capital of the world. DC needs instant runoff voting, and people who live here need to vote here, where your vote counts far more proportionally than it does wherever you come from (Vermont and Wyoming being the exceptions) – and the election results affect you far more.

Regardless of the outcome, politics neither begins nor ends with elections. No matter who wins, albeit to varying degrees, we collectively have the power to decide what they do.

 

Note: Despite the verbosity of this post I know there are more issues and positions candidates have taken that are worth discussing. Please comment below and let me and other readers know your thoughts – I’m happy to make edits (which I will note where I do) if I’m convinced that I’ve missed or mischaracterized something.

This post has been edited to correct the fact that Nate Bennett-Fleming is the shadow representative, not the shadow senator. It has also been edited to note that Mayor Gray did not merely echo the DC Chamber of Commerce’s proposal but was to the right of it – both called for $10/hr but he opposed indexing to inflation while the Chamber didn’t.

The long rebuilding in the wake of Sandy

I lay awake the night Sandy made landfall, checking twitter obsessively to see who was getting hit and how badly. As I saw the pictures and stories come in – cars floating down the street, hundreds of thousands without power, whole neighborhoods on fire – and compared it to what little we were going through in DC, I felt guilt flood over me.

A week later I put out a call for donations, which two friends and I would bring up to survivors of the storm on a weekend of volunteering. The response was overwhelming – after just a couple of emails, more than fifty people responded and followed through with trash bags full of clothes and blankets, boxes of food and bottled water, and money for us to rent a truck and buy more supplies for donation. I spent a day and a half driving around the city picking up donations, and I still couldn’t quite get to everyone.

Many of the donors thanked me for giving them a way to help, and I imagine some were happy for it to double as a belated spring-cleaning. I wondered to myself why at least nine out of every ten donors was a woman.

hi Sarah!

My original vision had been to fill a sedan with donations, but now we were hitting the road with a 14 foot Uhaul full of bags of clothing – the back was like an oversized ball pit – and a generator purchased with donated funds.

On the way to New York that Friday night we decided to stop and drop off donations somewhere in New Jersey, which was hit hard but didn’t seem to be getting the same outpouring of grassroots support that Occupy Sandy was providing in New York. The only Occupy Sandy NJ site we could find that was open late enough that night was a restaurant called Sandi Point Coastal Bistro, in Somer’s Point.

The owner, Dan, gave us a warm welcome late on a cold night, though his restaurant was clearly closed. He said a lot of folks in the community had lost everything, including many of his workers – any donations we gave would be used.

We grabbed two laundry carts and wheeled them out to our truck, filled them with bags, wheeled them in, and repeated a few more times. While we worked he told us more about the aftermath of the storm. One of his friends had a liquor warehouse in which nearly everything had been destroyed by water damage. A regular at the restaurant had come in complaining about losing cable – the owner called him an idiot to his face, and followed up by telling him he should be offended. A few days later the guy came back and apologized.

After we brought in a couple dozen bags of donations, Dan brought us into one of the restaurant’s large, dimly lit, ornate dining rooms, put down three heaping plates of food (making sure to accommodate the vegetarians among us, though the kitchen was closed), put Ray LaMontagne’s “You Are the Best Thing” on the house speakers, and sat down with us.

At this point it was 1:15 in the morning. For the next hour we sat and talked.

“The thing about this – it just affected everybody,” Dan said. “I have a waiter that, you know, he’s divorced, been in alimony, all kinds of stuff. He’s down on his luck. Moved here from Virginia, had his family here, and – he lost everything. He’s renting an apartment; they called him up, said you have to get everything out – by tomorrow. If you don’t get it out by tomorrow – the building’s condemned; we’re not letting you back in.

“And then you have right down the street, literally, from where he lives – probably two or three blocks – multi-million dollar homes. And if you go down that street, the streets are just piled with furniture. Just stacks of furniture, clothing, appliances, everything.“

On the restaurant speakers, Creedence Clearwater Revival was singing, “I wanna know… have you ever seen rain?”

“Jersey’s one of the most expensive places in the country,” Dan continued. “You have all these homes that are demolished. Sometimes we don’t want to feel sorry for rich people. But they got hit too. Sometimes it’s not about furnishings, it’s about everything else you lose. I’m gettin’ to a point in my life where I don’t care about a lot of the stuff I have. I don’t have kids to pass on my photo album to, but some of these families do. And they lost all that stuff. It’s like a fire, you lose everything in your house – your kid’s first pair of shoes, you know, all those things are gone. Some people made it out okay, and some people just got wiped out.

“We were blessed here, the eye went right over this. We were fortunate here, where the storm was going 15 miles an hour, and if it woulda kept going that rate and that speed, it woulda hit this coast, prime time, full tide, full moon, high tide. The second tide of the day. The first tide hit, and people I talked to said after the tide went out – the tide didn’t go out. The docks are up, and they’re waiting for the tide to go out, and the docks never went down. And then the storm sped up, and it just kind of blew through real quick so it missed that high tide by an hour or so – and that actually saved us here. It didn’t do a lot for the people up north, because it just pushed all that water up there.”

Now, with surreal timing, it was Bob Dylan in the background: “How does it feel… to be without a home?”

“The wind’s just gonna go and it’s gonna blow – that storm coulda wavered 15 miles. If it woulda come into the coast 15 miles south, we woulda been Seaside Heights. We woulda just been blown away. It coulda just wavered one little notch, and that’s how it affected everyone.

We stayed to talk with the owner until at least 3 in the morning; he had made us food even though the kitchen was closed, and he had a lot of stories to tell – about his travels, his inner push-and-pull between hippie and capitalist, his guilt at not being directly hit by the storm. When I went to use the bathroom before hitting the road, I saw two posters for Sandy fundraisers he was holding, with 100% of profits going to relief.

We got back on the road, but soon realized that none of the Occupy Sandy centers in New York were still open 24/7. If we kept driving we’d be getting into the city at 6am with a truck and nowhere to go. So we decided to pull over at a rest stop and catch a couple hours of sleep. Sarah and I buried ourselves in the mounds of donated bags of blankets and clothes while Mookie slept in the cab. We were freezing, but knowing there were tens of thousands of people without heat or power throughout the region kept things in perspective.

When we got to the Occupy Sandy hub at The Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, in Clinton Hill, I was first overwhelmed by the scale of the church-turned-warehouse and its contents. As people arrived by the dozen to volunteer, the only thing I could compare it to was an anthill. Once the activity started to pick up around 9 or 10am, I felt out of place pausing just long enough to send a tweet or take a picture.

(but I took a picture anyway)

Bags and boxes of donations came in, and were directed to an Intake table, where a woman would quickly sort them and direct someone to inventory them in a certain part of the church – every pew was stacked high with goods, and someone told me the whole place had been emptied and filled five times the previous day. There were enough volunteers that they had people lined up to pass donationsto each other out of the church, like a human conveyor belt, with no one having to walk or even hold a box for more than a few seconds. The boxes were then loaded onto trucks – including, the day we were there, volunteer UPS trucks and College Hunks trucks – which would deliver them to distribution sites in areas hit by Sandy. Many of the volunteers were from a local high school, there on a Saturday to pitch in. Meanwhile, in another corner of the church, trainers were teaching volunteers how to canvass apartment buildings for needs assessments.

There was a real vibrancy reminiscent of the old Occupy parks, but it wasn’t just directed at fomenting revolutionary consciousness. It was very intentionally directed at running a relief network.

The horizontal nature of the organization can easily be mistaken for lack of organization. No one was there telling everyone else what to do. When we first got there, we asked a few different people what we should do, and got a few different answers – which, to us, meant we should just do whatever we thought would be most helpful. Our agency in making that decision meant that we would be more committed to it. When we were told our truck could be useful, we agreed to use it to make donation deliveries.

We packed our truck full of donations and headed out for The Rockaway, Queens. When we reached it, I was immediately transported back to my time in post-Katrina New Orleans. Piles of furniture and sodden belongings sat in piles outside of homes. Boarded up businesses and a pervasive military presence gave the place a slight post-apocalyptic feel. There were volunteers and homeowners digging out houses and trashing ruined belongings everywhere.

We realized that the huge field of dump trucks and garbage mounds we’d passed on the way in was a brand new landfill, full of belongings people never intended to throw away, growing by the minute. Once you got within a couple blocks of the coast, the streets were covered in sand. Every street was lined with cars coated in dry mud, positioned awkwardly after floating out of position – almost every car I saw on the peninsula of The Rockaways was finished. Police and military officers were everywhere, directing slow-moving traffic. The boardwalk, which had just been renovated a year earlier, was deconstructed into cement columns still standing in the water and piles of plywood rubble on the beach.

the boardwalk, in pieces

A gas station had a homemade Do Not Enter sign at the driveway; others just had really long lines. When we asked after the closest gas station, a volunteer asked us what our license plate number was. It turned out it ended with an odd number, meaning that, because of rationing, we couldn’t buy gas that day. Without gas donated by Occupy Sandy volunteers, we would have been stranded in The Rockaways, which volunteers are told to leave by 4pm.

When we went to deliver donated goods to a local Hispanic church, we were inspired to see a community center giving out clothes, food and other things needed in the community. Naomi Klein, renowned author of The Shock Doctrine, showed up, doing research on grassroots responses to disasters, which will become important to understand as climate change intensifies. Companies can profit from a lot of terrible things, and climate disasters are one of them. If communities can come together over reconstruction instead of being pushed out by companies (and their politician friends) that want their land, there’s a model worth replicating.

Naomi Klein interviewing Luis, one of the organizers of the community center distributing clothes and food

All of this was exciting, and it felt good to give supplies to people who needed them and would put them to immediate use. But my heart sank when people realized we had flashlights and started flocking to us for them. We’d been told to bring them back from the church to the distribution center, but we just couldn’t. It was more than two weeks since the storm, and people were begging us for flashlights. They still couldn’t see in their own homes, and they were thanking us profusely for light, the most basic of amenities.

The next day we got up early to meet a group of Occupy Sandy volunteers and go out to the Rockaways to help gut buildings so they could be rebuilt. We had brought the truck back to Uhaul the previous night; today we got a ride with a guy who had driven up from Connecticut earlier that same morning. In our exchange of Occupy stories, he told us he had been punished by the UConn student government for organizing a concert in which the performer had done a song about the Occupy movement.

A sign hangs outside a home, asking “Where is LIPA”, referring to the Long Island Power Authority. The other sign says “14 days, no power”

While driving around the Rockaways looking for our destination, we asked a man coming out of his house for directions. “I don’t know,” he said, “I just moved here a month ago.” He wore a stunned expression, and behind him I could see through his open door someone in his house, pulling up a carpet, grappling with what to do with a wrecked first floor.

Finally we found our destination, Pilgrim Church of Arverne, where our team of about a dozen volunteers put masks and gloves on and prepared to start removing everything. Our team leader reminded us to ask the pastor before trashing anything that might have personal significance to him.

It’s disconcerting to walk into a church where the pews are in disarray and the floor is covered in slick brown grime, most likely a combination of shit and mud. I watched in amazement as Pastor Dennis Loncke led our team in trashing everything in his office, directing people to empty the sodden contents of his desk drawers into trash bags. We spent the day taking apart the church’s events room – tossing all the tables and chairs outside on the sidewalk, prying up the tiles and floorboards, tearing down the walls – taking it back to square one.

The imprint of a table remains in the muck of the church floor as Sarah rolls it out to the sidewalk.

Pastor Loncke sprays down the floor of his church function room.

Roslyn Loncke walks back into her church.

At some point I found Roslyn Loncke, the pastor’s wife, sweeping the sidewalk outside. She told me a bit about the humble-looking church, which the pastor built in the shell of a warehouse thirteen years ago. It was not only a church and a place for weddings and birthday parties – including one the day the storm hit – but also an afterschool center, a polling place (though not this year), and a host to New York State Senate debates. “It was our community center,” she said.

I didn’t have to say much before stories of the storm came pouring out of her. The night of the storm she was standing on her porch wondering why she was hearing so many car alarms going off. Then, she said, “The ocean water came down this way,” pointing one way down the street, “and the bay water came from this way,” pointing in the other direction.

“It was fast. It was going rapid. It was rapid.  When the ocean met with that bay there, it went inside the first floor and tackled the whole first floor, turned over everything – the refrigerator, you would think it was like a toy. When I went in my house it was a total mess.

“It took all the oil tankers and just ripped them out of the house,” she said. “That’s how powerful. Somebody’s porch was on the corner in our yard. That’s how forceful.”

Ms. Loncke said everyone she knew had made it out alive, but no such luck for their belongings. “See the black car on the side there?” she pointed past the church. “The guy brought his car there, thinking it was gonna be safe. Brand new car! Gone. That’s why it’s still sitting there, ‘cause he’s like ‘that’s it.’”

The contents of the church sit outside, waiting to be taken away.

Later I talked with the pastor’s daughter, Ozzy, a woman in her late 20’s, after she brought us bags of food from Starbucks, where she works. “It takes a lot of time,” one volunteer said to her, in an attempt to comfort.

“It takes more than time,” Ozzy said. “I don’t know if they’re gonna let us move back into our house.

“I told my mom it’s probably a real new life for me because I just got a job at Geico. A salary job. But the problem is my car went under, so how am I gonna get there? So now I have a week to find a car. I have a week. I’m gonna find one.”

On top of that, she said, her nephew’s school in the Rockaways was shuttered by the storm. “I don’t know how we’re gonna get him to school right now,” she said. To go to the school where he was told to go for the time being, the eight year old would have to get to and from Brooklyn by himself every day.

The recovery will take a long time – far longer than the headlines will continue to call attention to it. Multiple people volunteered to me that a few weeks after the storm, a lot of folks hadn’t begun to clean up. “Because they just don’t know where to begin,” Ozzy said. Nobody knows like – y’all know that you’re supposed to gut the walls two feet above the water line. They don’t know that, so they’ll gut it in the wrong place and still have mold in their house, and then they don’t know what to do. You have little kids, and this could really ruin their respiratory system. I don’t know what they’re gonna do.”

Emergency evacuation diagrams hang in the foreground as volunteers tear down moldy drywall in the church’s events room.

The lack of power – no lights in buildings on the streets and in buildings at night, for example – has also caused chaos in an area that already had crime and poverty issues before the storm. “There’s a lot of crime going on around here,” Ozzy said. “Gunpoint robberies, rapes; I’ve even heard there’s a couple murders going on that’s gone unreported. I know they’re focusing on the actual relief of the flood and the disaster, but there’s gonna be a worse disaster if they don’t get the crime down here.” The New York Times recently reported on bodies being found in newly created post-Sandy dumping grounds.

As for his gutted church, Pastor Loncke doesn’t quite know how it will be rebuilt. He pays $5000 per year to his insurance company, GuideOne, but yet the company said it couldn’t do anything for him (“We all know the plans and purpose of insurance companies,” he said. “They’re basically there to make money, not to assist.”). He has four years left to finish paying the mortgage on the building, and he has a back mortgage – which he took out to pay for the church – on his now-flooded home.

“So right now I don’t see it physically,” he said, “but spiritually I know it’s there. I know that just like how God sent help to clean, I know he’s going to send help to rebuild. I did not start by what I have seen – I started on faith, and I’m gonna leave here on faith.

Pastor Loncke has a family of seven, and a seemingly infinite amount of resilience. He said growing up in Guyana gave him the perspective to handle the kind of situation that, to others, is devastating.

“I understand floods; I understand to go without,” he said. “It’s just amazing to see through a storm how things can make everyone change – their lives, their plans, the things that they had wanted to do. For some it will be a change for the better, for some it will be a change that if they don’t understand what is going on in the financial world, in the spiritual world, in the physical world – how we must live together – then it’s gonna be total devastation.

“When you hear comments from people talking about you’re living in the third world – they really don’t understand what the third world means. A third world means that you just doesn’t have hope. You hope that there is hope. But you have no hope. So all what you strive on is that you must survive.”

Pastor Loncke and his family know what must be done day by day, even if they don’t yet see the bigger picture of how to get back to where they were before.

“Most folks, they’ll ask you, what is your long-term goal, where are you going from here? What is the next step? But for you to have that, you have to sit back and spend a whole lot of time analyzing.

“While you’re analyzing that information, the mold is taking your building over.”

I didn’t really know what to say as I parted ways with Ozzy. All I could summon was, “stay strong.”

“Oh, I’m gonna have to,” she said. “There’s no other choice.”

As she walked away, she looked at a piece of her family church’s wall that had been put out on the sidewalk. “I can’t believe all this mold,” she said. “How does it grow so fast?”

Money for love

Delhi

“Can I tell you my love story?” said the rickshaw driver, earnestly locking eyes with me through the rearview mirror.

“Yeah!” we said eagerly, being two couples ourselves, and finding nothing more refreshing than a rickshaw driver who was talkative, young and seemingly trustworthy.

“I met her at a party,” he said. “I went to her and said Wow, you are so beautiful! Where are you from? She said she was from Agra, and I said well you are really more beautiful than the Taj Mahal.

“She was shocked and said that is not true! Yes it is, I said. No, she said. Yes, no, yes, no – Indian girls are very difficult.

“After we talked some more I asked for her number. Why should I give you my number? she said, I have just met you.

“Okay, I said, I will explain to you why you are more beautiful than the Taj Mahal. If you like my reasons then you must give me your number. She said okay.

“I took five minutes to think about it and then came back to her.

“You are more beautiful than the Taj Mahal because I can go on a date with you – with the Taj Mahal I cannot have a conversation. You are more beautiful than the Taj Mahal because I can hug you – the Taj Mahal is too big. And you are more beautiful than the Taj Mahal because I can kiss you, and it is illegal to kiss the Taj Mahal.

“She laughed out loud and said, ‘I like your sense of humor. I will not give you my number, but I will take yours.‘ Two days later she called and we went on a date. And now, can you believe it, we are engaged!”

But it was a love marriage, not an arranged marriage. It had to be more complicated than that.

“Her family is very much rich, and I am very poor,” he said. “After she agreed to marry me I went to her father and he said we cannot marry until I find a good job. So now I rent this rickshaw for 400 rupees a day ($10). I pay 100 for petrol ($2) and then make 500 ($12) profit. But soon I will go to school and be a banker.

“Before, I worked at McDonald’s for 45 rupees ($1) an hour, but that was very boring. With this job I can drive around the city, meet new people and practice my English. Soon I will be a banker. I think my future is very bright.”

To go from a rickshaw driver to a banker may sound a bit fanciful, but with a decade of 7%+ economic growth under its belt India is a country full of high expectations. It’s for these dreams that 31 people migrate to an Indian city every single minute. The fantastical ambitions, the Romeo and Juliet love stories, the bucking of parental expectations – these are the growing pains of the new India.

We stopped at a five star Sheraton hotel to check out a world-famous restaurant we’d read about – Bill Clinton once called its food “exquisite.” At the front entrance stood a guard whose physical enormity, grandiose mustache and traditional regalia evoked thoughts of royal guards centuries past. The main lobby caressed us with cool air, shiny tiled floors and tasteful, modern Indian-fusion decor. A giant, turbaned Punjabi man stepped out of the elevator, suitcase in tow, talking seriously into a cell phone.

A more modestly sized clerk showed us to the restaurant with a deference punctuated by a knowing smirk – for once in India, our money wouldn’t be enough to make us belong. The menu was laughable – entrees starting at 2500 rupees ($55), with a veg platter for 7900 rupees ($200) and a simple roti (piece of bread) for 200 rupees ($5).

“Modest prices,” I deadpanned, and a few giggles escaped from Phoebe, Julia and Brendan. We walked back outside, past the royal guard, to the hot, humid world we came from. We got back in the rickshaw and went to a restaurant full of middle class Indians.

That rickshaw driver is still out there now, chauffeuring strangers in pursuit of his life’s dream. Elsewhere, someone is blowing that man’s monthly income on dinner and drinks.

racecar

Then, waiting at a red light in separate rickshaws, my friend Anand and I reach across a lane of traffic to bump fists.

“Let’s fist bump, I love you man!” we cry gaily to each other.

The motorcyclist between us glares through his visor back at Anand, then around to the other side at me.

“You’re right, I gotta stay in Pune this weekend!” I yell into my cell phone like a general in the heat of battle. “What was I thinking?”

Through both eyes I see my buddy shouting and smiling out of the rickshaw, mirroring me. Through one ear I hear real Anand, voice drowning at sea; through the other I hear loud cell phone Anand, voice bobbing afloat. My real voice launches ambitiously towards him but fizzles and dies prematurely, disintegrated by the smelly vibrating clamor of motors. My cell phone voice carries. Despite being ten feet away from each other and looking into each other’s eyes, we both stay on the phone. I lean out and yell to him, he leans out and yells to me – two people, four voices.

Anand’s rick has pulled up and stopped next to ours, a few meters away, motorcycles revving between us.

I’m taking mental bullets of epiphany. “When I return, they’ll be gone.” I only have a week left with my closest friends in India, before we all go home or off to find ourselves up North.

“This is our last weekend together! Sam, bloody hell!” Anand yells over the smog and jackhammer din of a rickshaw, “You know I’m leaving for up North before you get back! See, Anita’s telling me you’re planning on going to Hampi this weekend! Heyyy,” It’s Anand! My phone rings.

We launch into oncoming lanes and regain the lead, hollering and waving as we drive by. Their rickshaw zooms off before ours can start. Obviously it’s a race. Anand and Anita hop in one rickshaw, Phoebe and I in the one right behind. It’s another great day leaving the office with friends.

[rewind sentence by sentence]

Thank you sir

Yeah I came here to find myself, but in some ways I’ve become even more confused. When the guard at my gate spontaneously asks for a few dozen rupees, what do I do? Guiltily refuse, rejecting the stereotype that white people are walking ATMs for those with enough pathetic looks in their back pockets? Or humbly give, doing my tiny part to equalize livelihoods, while training him to accost the next white guy who comes along?

Am I smug or gracious? Am I apart from or a part of this place? What kind of person am I?

Last week I bought a homeless man 170 rupees (that’s about four dollars, or three cheap dinners) worth of fruit. That’s a lot when you’ve seen a beggar kiss a 10-rupee bill.

As I moved to finish my walk home, he stepped in front of me: “Please sir, I need cut nails, just one nail cutter sir.”

“Look, I just bought you 170 rupees worth of food!” I blew up, “Don’t try to use me man!”

Too late for that.

“Ok,” he said, “thank you sir.”

The beef market

As we approach the beef market I see the beef van has just pulled up. A pile of squishy looking organs sit on the road next to it, just past them is a smattering of severed cow hooves. A kitten looks up from among them. When we enter the enclave everything turns to dark brown. A dark brown man in grimey brown clothes walks toward me and wags his finger no, put that camera away. Dead serious. He moves, barefoot, to unload a severed half cow carcass hoisted by two men onto his head, helmeted by a dark browned sawed-off soccer ball. I look down, all is dark brown, the water murky in the open gutter. The beef man walks from the truck into the market, the gaping open cow abdomen on his head revealing a mess of wet organs bouncing along to his step. Another man pushes a dead cow on a cart, legs splayed apart in a way it could never do alive, like a woman waiting for a fuck. Like a piece of meat.

Inside the market, no one smiles. A cow head sits on a table in the corner, upside down, eyes blank. Carcasses hang, cats wait lazily for scraps, blood pools. The damage has been done. A man grabs a cow head by the horns and hacks away at it, skinless but for the fur sprouted around the horns. Soon the horns are no longer one with the head, the man reaches in for a brain which he removes with one hand, drops in a small plastic bag. Throws the bag casually on a morass of red organs. Drops the head, teeth out, eyes open but no longer looking, tongue wagged to the side. A wet thump is its eulogy. He picks up the next one, butcher knife attacks bone. I turn around and see a pile of tangled cow horns – thick, sturdy, lifeless. I can’t breathe. I just want to spit, spit out that smell of death, that taste of death that has found its way through my nostrils into my mouth and onto my tongue. I lock eyes with the butcher, he can surely only see disgust on my face. On his I see shame.

What do we tell the kids?

My introduction to the village was severe. The woman who runs a development NGO there explained it like this: “There’s gambling, there’s prostitution, mafia, drugs, murder. People who don’t want good things to happen in the village. And the children are dumb,” she said, “dense as two planks of wood.”

“So I thought if I brought two white people to explain things to them, they might understand something.” Thus my friend Mera and I were recruited to teach village kids at a summer camp.

We leave our young ones a long road ahead, and a steep climb.

When we walked into the room, all the children, ages 3 to 13, rose and said, “Good morning madam!” to the woman leading us. Individually and in pairs the kids came to the front to present songs and monologues in Marathi, none of which we could understand.

Then it was our time to lead. First we improvised our way through a yoga lesson we were pretty unqualified to teach. Then the NGO director asked me to talk to the kids about plastic, using her for translation.

Plastic is a big problem in India, where the only reliable drinking water generally comes from disposable bottles. I told the kids about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of trash in the Pacific Island half the size of India, contributed to by debris from rivers around the world. The plastic spreads toxic chemicals through the oceans and kills animals that mistake it for food. I told them to avoid breathing in the fumes of burning plastic. (Because Indian trash collection is nearly nonexistent, the streets, especially in larger cities, are littered with piles of smoldering garbage.) And lastly I told them about how plastic takes 500 to 1000 years to biodegrade, and asked them if they thought it was fair to leave trash for future generations to deal with. They shook their heads no.

After my spiel, the director asked if I had anything else to add. My instinct was to tie it all together with some kind of progressive solution. But I couldn’t come up with anything. I couldn’t fairly tell them to avoid bottled water when I drink it every day. And recycling infrastructure hardly exists, especially in small towns – so telling them to recycle their bottles would be mostly futile.

In fact I think this demographic – young, small-footprint, village children needed this lesson least. Villagers hardly buy bottled water. Many probably don’t understand the garbage patch or even the size of India. Better would be to ask municipalities why they don’t either protect water so everyone can drink it, or implement trash and recycling collection schemes so the earth and air aren’t clogged with pollution. Then maybe we could tell our kids a good story instead of begging them to fix a bad one.

It’s a sad state of affairs when we can tell our young ones what’s wrong with the world, but then can’t tell them what to do about it. Do you have any ideas?

A slightly different version of this piece was posted on the blog of Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR).

Every little thing

I caught some flack for my recent post on the oppression of Indian women – mostly from Indian women. I’m learning that the biggest challenge of being here is to see life from an Indian’s eyes. And also, at the same time, to recognize that every Indian has different eyes.

“Sexual harassment is about power, not sex,” my friend Smeeta tells me. I scratch my head. “But it must be about both,” I say. “Of course men want power, but it doesn’t help that they’re sexually oppressed. Only the most modern people date before marriage. Couples don’t even hold hands in public!”

“But here’s the thing,” she says. “We don’t think we’re sexually oppressed. We look at you Westerners kissing in public and we say you should get a room!”

Another Indian friend reminds me of how many cultures there are in India, and how each one has different customs, histories and ways of treating women. When you place an ad in the Times of India marriage classifieds, for example, you can choose between 58 distinct Hindu communities and 300 Hindu castes, as well as dozens of Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Jain communities, and 11 major mother tongues.

It’s far too complex for me to comprehend, but at the same time it’s simple – things happen here that would rarely happen in my country.

I think back on my European friend’s horror stories from her time in urban India. Having a man call to her from the street, turning to see him sitting on his motorcycle wacking off. Repeatedly having her breasts grabbed by strangers on the streets of Delhi. Surely there’s a sick power dynamic at work here – but you don’t hear of men having these problems. There must also be a repressed sexual longing behind this perverse behavior.

Regardless of how much women are oppressed, they are equally strong. One night I’m sitting with my friend Ajay, sipping on sweet, milky Indian tea. A ragged, unhappy looking man rises from a nearby bench and begins yelling at the woman and girl working the stand.

I ask Ajay what he’s saying. “That husband and wife are always yelling at each other, even beating sometimes,” he says. The woman continues serving customers, steadfast next to her husband’s anger. Amid the din of yelling, he kicks a plastic stool at his daughter. She glares at him from a hurt but defiant brow.

“What are they saying to each other?” I ask Ajay.

“She says you’re eating our income, you’re worth nothing, you’re less than a woman. You should be wearing Bengals [a traditional Indian bracelet for women],” he says, as their shouts continue. “I’ve seen them fighting before. Sometimes she tells him if he doesn’t leave she’ll throw boiling oil in his face.”

I pay the ten-year-old girl and we walk away. “I’m sure that was an arranged marriage,” Ajay says. “I’m sure when they married she didn’t expect that she would have to do all the house work and also to support the family.” But now she’s doing it, and she won’t let her husband stop her.

While I abhor the mistreatment of women, I no longer feel so justified judging everything I see here. To judge before understanding is simply illogical. Besides, I see that what I considered wrong is often only part of the story. For instance you don’t see men and women holding hands together – “repression,” where I come from – but you do see men holding hands with men, women holding hands with women. I see guys my age spooning each other, sitting on each other’s laps, even laying their heads on each other’s laps – all in a heterosexual, non-ironic, nonchalant way. Unfortunately such behavior would be ostracized if it were homosexual. But coming from a society in which men only touch out of romance or violence, I find it beautiful.

And I can only imagine it acts as a natural outlet for the desire of all people to touch and be touched. When the (Western) movie stars can kiss but you can’t, when police might attack you for sitting in “objectionable poses” in the park, when you’re probably not having sex before marriage – you find another way to live.

During my first two months in India my hairline was receding even more quickly than usual. I mentioned it to my good friend Nanjee, a foreigner who’s been here for about a year. “Yeah,” he said, “I lost a lot of hair my first few months here. It must be all the stress, the adjustment, the environmental toxins….” Makes sense, I thought, picturing the foul smelling water that showers my body and flows from my tap, the air quality that supposedly equals smoking a pack a day. But then I started looking around at Indian men, and noticed that they all have nice hair. Neat, stylish, combed and full, Indian hair is something to be admired. Whatever pulls my hair clearly does not pull theirs. The little things that torment, shock and amuse me are simply life for them.

Of fear and love

The other day at the bus station a man with one eye and a pen knife approaches me and starts speaking in Hindi. I look at him skeptically, take a few pointed glances at the folded blade between his hands and shift slowly away. He doesn’t seem to mind.

It’s broad daylight and I’m flanked to my right by two pre-pubescent boys eagerly peddling mango juice. I’ve already told them no, the two water bottles in my hands are enough liquid for me. But they trail me anyway, undeterred.

After getting a safe arm’s distance from the cyclops and his knife I start trying to figure out what he’s saying. “Where you go?” he asks gruffly. “Pune,” I say.

“Bus over there!” he points, still fingering the dormant blade. I realize I still don’t know if he’s trying to threaten or help me, if he’s being territorial or friendly.

“I know,” I say. All buses in this station go to Pune. “I’m waiting for my friend! Mera dost ata hai,” I explain in workable Hindi.

“Ah, dost,” he says, and walks away. Whether because I no longer seemed alone and vulnerable or because he could see I didn’t need help, I don’t know.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever let down my guard in the streets of India. When little kids run up to you and yell “money!” you begin to see that for many of them you’re just a walking wallet. I often walk around with a grimace – my mask of fearlessness and indifference – only to see it reflected back at me. Who started it? Should I let the beer vendor and rickshaw driver trying to rip me off affect how I interact with the waiter and the other rickshaw driver? It’s hard not to, at least so far.

A patch of green in the drylands