Kadir Nelson’s painting, “Madiba,” is the cover of the New Yorker. The Huff Post collection of front pages from around the world honoring Mandela made me cry.
“The fact that people who are fighting for freedom have lost their freedom being incarcerated is more than ironic.” Ai Wei Wei takes over Alcatraz with an art installation.
The NY Times series about the contemporary face of homelessness, Invisible Child, centers on one eleven year old whose story will sear your heart. What shocks me about the story is how much today’s homeless experience in NYC mirrors that in the 70s, before conservative mayors came along and “cleared out” homeless people, and then revamped the safety net with a series of now failed reforms. We are back to housing people in massive structures with deplorable conditions and infuriatingly few resources. Imagine over 16,000 children in NYC alone, currently growing up with no place to call home. It beggars the imagination why we keep doing things this way when it's less costly to place people in real apartments. Is the point of our approach to strip dignity and the capacity for a better future from the people least able to resist?
On Black Friday we went to the river to walk, not a soul in sight, just the rapid water, the icy path through the trees. I was stunned to find the park devoid of humans on a beautiful holiday weekend afternoon, till I remembered the God of Shopping. There is something extreme, fully dystopian, in our contemporary materialism spiral and the way it dovetails the wrenching-wide income gap.
