Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Barack Obama and the moral imperative

I finally got around to listen to a podcast of Bill Moyers’ Journal from this past weekend and thought this exchange with Princeton University professor, Melissa Harris-Lacewll, was interesting and explained a lot about what will need to happen if progressives are to have influence over an Obama administration:

BILL MOYERS: You mentioned policy ills. And this gets me to the question of governance. So what do you, as progressives, as liberals, what do you expect of him that will fulfill your hopes for him, beyond the symbolism into the actual world of policy and decision making?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: One of the images I’ve been using as we’ve been going around the country trying to place the King holiday in the context of a new Obama era is I’ve been using the image, iconic image of Barack Obama excuse me. Ah! Of Martin Luther King…

BILL MOYERS: There you go.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Right. Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson together in the White House. And I say to people, okay, where’s — if you can superimpose Barack Obama’s face onto one of these two characters, onto whose face would you project it? And most people say, “Oh, well, King.” And I say, “No, no, no, no. Barack Obama’s LBJ in this picture.”

We’ve elected him to the U.S. presidency. So the missing image is who will play the role of King? Because, in fact, the president needs Kings. I actually think it’s plural. It’s not a single King. But the myth-

BILL MOYERS: You mean that they need agitators out there-

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: That’s-

BILL MOYERS: -who are pressing them to do the right thing-

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: That’s exactly right.

BILL MOYERS: -as Lyndon Johnson said to Martin Luther King — go out there and make it possible for me to do the right thing.

Basically, it comes down to the idea that it is the people in this democracy who are responsible for pushing their elected representatives to act. That’s why I chafe at the use of the word leader when referring to the president and Congress. They must show leadership, I guess, but it is more important that they follow the imperatives laid down by the masses.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Homelessness on the rise

New Jersey’s homeless population shrank between 2005 and 2007, but advocates for the poor say the faltering economy is reversing the trend.

Accoding to a survey done by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there were 17,314 homeless persons in New Jersey in 2007, or about 20 for every 10,000 New Jerseyans. That was down about 11 percent over the two-year period. In addition, the state saw decreases in the all categories of homelessness during that time period.

The state, according to the survey, has fared better than the rest of the nation — which has 22 homeless persons per 10,000 people with a greater percentage (18 percent to 15 percent) considered chronically homeless and a dramatic 42 percent being unsheltered, compared with just 14 percent in New Jersey.

Part of the reason for this is New Jersey’s relative wealth — the per capita income in the state is higher than most other states and just 8 percent of New Jerseyans live below the poverty line, compared with 13 percent nationally. Of course, the cost of living here is higher, which distorts some of the economic numbers.

According to the survey, there was one category in which New Jersey outpaced the rest of the country — a troubling statistic that could help explain the anecdotal evidence being compiled by advocates for the homeless: A greater percentage of New Jerseyans face what is called a “severe housing cost burden — 19 percent — than the rest of the nation.

As the recession — what some are calling “The Great Recession” — deepens and more people face job loss, reduced hours (and wages) and increased costs for fuel, heat, food and other necessities, more and more people could find themselves facing homelessness.

Lisanne Finston, director at Elijah’s Promise in New Brunswick, told The Home News Tribune she is seeing evidence of this already. Surveys being collected to help prepared for the biennial point in time survey, she said, are showing “the number of people that we have counted are significantly higher than last year” and that, “Across the board, in each category, the numbers are up, we’re at least 10 percent higher and getting to 20 percent.”

“Anecdotally, we’re seeing people coming in who have suffered foreclosures and have exhausted all their resources,” Finston said. “Not only have the national trends reversed, but we are only at the beginning of how bad it’s going to get.”

Mercer County advocates, quoted in The Times of Trenton, are seeing the same trends. The county had experienced a 47 percent drop in the number of homeless people, according to the survey, but Mary Gay Abbott-Young, executive director of Rescue Mission of Trenton, told the paper that her “organization has been providing shelter for additional people for several months now.” She reported a 21 percent increase for the first two weeks of January, compared with the same time last year.

Abbott-Young said the economic crisis — a factor driving more people into shelters — has also resulted in a decrease in furniture and clothing donations, but the organization received monetary donations during the holidays last month.

“We’re going to have an increase in factors known to contribute to homelessness,” she said, “unemployment, increase in stress levels, mortgage foreclosures.”

We have entered a dark economic period, but we remain among the richest nations in history. Surely, we can do better than to have our people living in shelters or on the streets.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Snowy mess

This morning’s commute in Central Jersey was a bit messy, but not the tough trudge that forecasters were predicting yesterday. But that is normal.

We tend to overreact to weather forecasts, assuming that what is being predicted is going to happen — or, more often, we hear regional forecasts and localize them in our minds. So when New York television stations predict 6 or 8 inches for points “north and west of the city,” which ends up being the headline and the promo, we assume that 6- to 8-inch storm across the state, ignoring the maps showing that southern Middlesex County, the Shore area and Burlington were likely to get significantly less.

So, the drive was fine for me, heading from Kendall Park to Princeton. And I have a half day at the office — it’s Annie’s birthday — but I will have to clear the driveway when I get home.

I hate the winter.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Doggie diary: The story of Rosie and Sophie The Houdini chapter

We arrived home tonight about 7 p.m., long day of work behind us, to a bit of a surprise.

Looking in the window, there were dozens of dog toys littering the living room. I left the house today at 10:45, the toys in the dogs’ toybox, but we have a friend’s college-age son walking them at midday. I figured he let them play with the toys and left them where they were when he left — no problem.

Except, that’s not what happened. As I took out my keys to unlock the door, Annie saw Sophie in the living room, loose. Loose?!? Was Rosie out, too? Sophie had escaped from her pen, somehow leaving Rosie behind. What happened? Did she leap the gate?

Turns out that Carlo left the lower gate hinge unlocked — or so we think — and Sophie, who is the burlier of the two pups, pushed her way through. Rosie, thinner and faster, probably couldn’t do so.

It was a bit of a scare, but there was no damage — Sophie confined her business to the newspapers by the entranceway and we’d closed the doors to the bedrooms.

But it was the culmination (I hope) to a trying week during which both Annie and I were at the end of our wits — they weren’t listening, were peeing in the house, picking up every leaf and stick outside and eating them — just a very frustrating time.

I think we my have contributed to it, however, because we forgot that they were puppies and were showing our frustration. And in our effort to not hit the dogs or react in anger, we were coming off whiny and losing control of them.

I’m hoping that, by recognizing our own failings in this mission, we can do a better job with them, take control and regain our own sanity.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.