Commentaries on Street Kids Broadcast on KUNM, Albuquerque, New México
December 2001 to the present

Imagine a little girl, perhaps eight years old, with blond curly hair and a heavy sweater. Her name is Ana Isabel, she tells me. It’s ten o’clock at night in the Alpujarra, one of the areas of Medellín that the police have abandoned to gangs and prostitutes. About fifty homeless kids have come to a filthy little park, hoping that the grass will make for a softer bed than the street. We might be tempted to pity these young refugees from war, poverty, and violence, but they were proud of their ability to survive in conditions that would quickly kill you or me.

I don’t know why, but Ana Isabel became furious with me -- perhaps because I didn’t give her candy, like the nun who came with me, perhaps because I reminded her of her father. Her cheeks reddened, she stomped her feet, then, with a final look of rage, she put a little plastic bag to her mouth, inhaled and exhaled. Inside was a glue that gave an instant and fatal high. She stepped closer and closer to me until each explosive breath slammed the bag against my stomach. Her red eyes were full of hatred -- against me, against the world, against herself.

The next night in Medellín embodies the contrasts that define Colombia. Though most famous for cocaine and violence, Medellín is also home to remarkable avante-garde art and theater. I went to see a minimalist version of the classic Greek drama, Medea. Medea, as you may remember, was princess of Colchis before Jason seduced her and convinced her to steal the Golden Fleece for him. When the play begins, years after the adventure of the Argonauts, Jason has abandoned Medea so that he can marry a Greek princess that will aid his new political aspirations. Jason and his allies have condemned Medea to live in a hut far from Corinth, and soon the king will send her into exile.

We remember Medea best for her revenge against Jason. The man has destroyed her, but she has no way to hurt him. In madness and despair, she kills their two children.

Thanks to Freud, Oedipus became the dominant metaphor for the 20th Century. I wonder if Medea isn’t our Oedipus -- think of little Ana Isabel: like Medea, she is powerless, forgotten. She has no power, no one respects or loves her -- she can’t even make people look at her, except in pity. And proud people -- whether a Colombian street urchin or a princess of Colchis -- despise pity.

So what power do Medea and Ana Isabel have? How can they take revenge on those who have hurt them, those who ignore them, on us, who let little girls live on the street? They can only hurt themselves. Medea murders the children she loves, because Jason loves them too. Ana Isabel destroys her brain with glue, because she sees the pain it brings to my face. I don’t need to point out the connection to the teenage Palestinians who strap bombs to their bodies, or anorexic American girls. Medea is the last refuge of the powerless, the hopeless, and the excluded... and a too terrible metaphor for the lives of many people in the 21st Century.

This is Kurt Shaw in Santa Fe for KUNM.





We all remember the KUNM fund drive last month -- largely because everyone was so thrilled that it could end early. Personally, I have to confess that I was relieved when I could again cook dinner to the dulcet voice of Robert Siegel, and I was sympathetic when Ira Glass, in a comic attempt to improve NPR market share and eliminate the need for fund drives, called up the producer of Friends for advice. If you remember, she suggested a theme song that the audience could clap to.

Then, on the last day of the on-air campaign, something happened to forever change my opinion of public radio fund drives. I was in the resource center for homeless teenagers here in Santa Fe, playing a game of chess against one kid. A boy looked for food in our pantry while his girlfriend rummaged through the donated clothes for an outfit for her new job. Several kids who sleeep under a bridge had collapsed on the sofa, hoping for a couple of minutes of safe sleep, and half a dozen more crowed around the computer to write emails. All in all, an average afternoon for street kids in Santa Fe.

The kids generally put Rage Against the Machine on the stereo, or maybe Tupac or System of a Down. That Friday, strangely, several wanted to hear jazz, so we turned the radio to KUNM -- though I love hip hop and hardcore more than most 30somethings, I was psyched to hear a bit of John Coltrane. Then, Mary B and Marcos Martinez came on the air to ask for donations, and I knew that somebody would strange the station.

Before she could make it to the radio, a girl caught herself. “Whoa, dude!” she declared. “They’re spanging!” Now, “Spange” comes from “spare change” -- in street argot, it means to beg. “Think how much money I could make spanging on the radio,” she went on. “Think how many people I could feed with that.” You’ll forgive me if I edit out the expletives of her original quote.

For kids who live on the street, spanging isn’t just a necessity. It’s also a moral act. Begging keeps you humble, they say -- after begging on the street, no man can pretend that he is an island, that he doesn’t need other people. This idea reminds me a little of Theravada Buddhist monks, or of the Franciscans. Other street kids say that spanging restores your hope in other people, allowing you to see their compassion and goodness. But the most important thing about spanging, everyone agrees, is that it opens you to other people -- you listen to other people, you learn. The relationship is brief, but it is real.

Do I need to draw the obvious connection to public radio fund drives? Like seeing a teenager on the street, a plea from KUNM can be annoying -- we’d rather turn away. But paying attention is what makes a real relationship -- we learn about the goodness of other people. We recognize that we all depend on each other. We stay humble. It’s how public radio is public.

This is Kurt Shaw in Santa Fe for KUNM.





I had just begun to counsel homeless teenagers when I first met Helen -- well, Helen isn’t really her name, but we’ll call her that. The terrors of her life didn’t shock me. Somehow I had expected them. What shocked me was the pleasure, almost joy, she got from telling her stories.

Helen had told me the story of her ex-boyfriend, how he had tied her to his bed and burned her with cigarettes or cut her with a razor. How, with the stereo blaring “Jeremy,” by Pearl Jam, he would scream into her ear until she told him she loved him. How, each time she mustered the courage to leave him, he would threaten to commit suicide. I can barely think of these stories a good four years after Helen told me them, but as she spoke, her eyes filled with... well, with what Russian novels always describe as “voluptuousness.”

Now, move this feeling to a national level, and you get Serbia. Ever since the battle of Kosovo Polye in the 14th Century, Serbs have been beaten up by one empire after another: the Ottoman Turks, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Russians. Listening to a Serb talk about history is an almost mystical experience, where each losing battle becomes one of the stygmata of Christ on the cross, further proof that the virtuous must suffer in this brutal and unjust world.

Here, of course, is the secret of the strange joy in Helen’s eyes. Unlike true masochism, where suffering and pleasure get all mixed up, here suffering is redeemed by righteousness -- or more exactly, by righteous indignation. If the evil stepfather abuses me, or if the infidel Turk conquers me, then I must be doing something right. The victim suffers, of course, and deserves pity. But more importantly, suffering shows that the victim is just and innocent. Otherwise, evil wouldn’t hate him so much.

For a girl who has always been told she is worthless, feeling just and innocent is wonderful. For a country, the story explains away suffering, makes its people part of something bigger than themselves. Equally important, it gives a real sense of pride: “because we are just, we have the strength to endure suffering and oppression.”

Though I could understand this joy in suffering abstractly, it never really made sense to me before September eleventh. You see, it has been a long time since America was a victim. Since World War One, we have told a different story: America is an actor on the world stage, fighting evil, righting wrongs, assuring freedom. Unfortunately, years of supporting African dictators and overthrowing democratic governments began to undermine that theory; many Americans had begun to wonder if our government was, in fact, just and good.

Then came Osama bin-Laden. The man works evil. He attacks America, killing thousands of innocent people. America has become a victim of evil.

And like Helen, as a victim, we can feel proud again. We wave our flags and remember that we are just and good and free. “They hate us for our freedom,” as George Bush declared.

The victim’s story can save a homeless girl’s life. But I wonder about a nation. I think about Serbia -- its genocide in Bosnia, its ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Victims don’t stay innocent.

This is Kurt Shaw in Santa Fe for KUNM.

Commentaries on Street Kids Broadcast on KWAB, Boulder, Colorado
November 1999 to the June 2001

What will it take for Americans to see how miserably our “war on drugs” has failed? Increasing drug use in spite of zillions of tax dollars hasn’t convinced us. The general erosion of civil liberties hasn’t either. Not urban decay, inner city violence, or the destruction of Mexico and Colombia. Not even the immense growth of non-violent prisoners and the immense expenditure of money incarcerating people whose only crime is against their own bodies. Our national narcotic-induced delusion has blinded us with the idea that we can fight drugs with prisons and guns.

Let me clarify this commentary with a bit of a personal confession. As a teenager, I was as intent an anti-drug zealot as you can imagine. At the age of 29, I’ve still never even tried marijuana. But now that I work with the casualties of America’s war on drugs, I have to reconsider the methods I’ve advocated to struggle against narcotics. Many of the homeless kids I counsel are not homeless because of drugs, but because of national drug policy. And until that changes, it will be a struggle for them to get off the street.

Take, for instance, a kid I worked with in New York. His mother had dealt heroin while he was growing up; it was a great source of income for a poor, uneducated woman whose criminal record made it impossible to find employment elsewhere. He started to use heroin at the age of nine, and by fifteen, his habit demanded so much of him that he left home and started to sell his body and his drug in order to get his daily hits.

By the time that I met him, the boy was 19. He desperately wanted to quit heroin (and coke and tobacco and alcohol, all of the subsidiary addictions he had developed in his years on the street). For a while, he tried to quit by himself, working as a prostitute so he wouldn’t have to deal to make money, he was a straight boy working as a gay prostitute; he needed all the drugs he could take to forget what he was doing.

On top of this, the boy had several warrants out for his arrest -- warrants for selling heroin, for possession.... The moment he checked himself into a drug rehab or a hospital, those warrants would come up on the computer, and the law would collapse around him. We talked about the possibility that a judge might look on him with leniency because he was working to improve himself, but consultations with a lawyer ended that hope. Mandatory sentencing guidelines mean that judges have no discretion. He would spend five years in jail no matter how much he had turned himself around. After a long bout of weeping, the boy left my office with the promise that he would return the next morning. I never saw him again.

I take this story as a metaphor for our national drug policy. The laws we have created to stop drug abuse only encourage it. They make rehabilitation impossible, encourage crime and prostitution, and make life unlivable for the people we most want to help. The experiment has failed. It’s time to think of something new.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







For the last several months, I’ve been counseling a young heroin addict. Dope has grabbed him harder than any of the dozens of addicts I’ve worked with, but at the same time, he is an immensely sweet kid with gentle eyes and what would be the world’s most winning smile if he had any teeth left. When he shows up for his irregular visits, I’m thrilled to talk with him, but he also leaves me on the verge of tears.

Almost a month ago, he was blissfully happy. He’d begun to go out with a girl. Well, more accurately, to sleep with her, so we talked for a while about sexually transmitted diseases and condoms and dental dams, but he really wanted most to talk about her. He told me about the violent, drugged out party where they’d met, but while I quelled at the stories of fistfights and razors and lines of coke on the bathroom floor, he just wanted me to see the girl’s eyes.

Suddenly, his face fell. I recognized the look -- he had just realized that something in his brain had broken down. He cursed at himself. “Man! I forgot her name!” He stood there in a daze, searching his mind for a good five minutes, but the name would not come. He walked out onto the street, dejected.

Two days later, he burst in, an expression of utter bliss on his face -- and not the bliss of heroin, either. This time there was real light in his eyes. “Dude!” he shouted. “I remembered her name!” He went on to tell me the same story he’d told before, but this time using the girl’s name as often as he could.

Then, about a week ago, I saw him amble aimlessly by the van we drive downtown to help kids who live on the streets of Santa Fe. Since I hadn’t seen him for a while, I hopped out of the van and called his name. Slowly, he turned around, and his lazy eyes searched my face. His muscles were slack and his pupils dilated, but finally, I noticed a glimmer in his eye. “Dude,” he said. “I almost recognized you.”

In a sense, of course, this boy’s story is pathetic and horribly tragic. You and I cannot even imagine the suffering he goes through. Yet, I don’t want to talk about the tragedy. I want to talk about how human this story is. And how profoundly honest.

I think of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” the novel where he tries to imagine the plight of a truly honest and guileless man in 19th century St. Petersburg. In a way, these are the same stories. The boy’s desperate straights -- his addiction, his nights on the street, his solitude -- don’t permit the guile and irony and petty lies that most of us use to defend ourselves from the world. When he falls in love, his happiness shines through his body. When his mind fails, his eyes cannot hide it. When he said to me, “Dude, I almost recognized you,” it came with a sort of pride, because he has to find joy in the smallest of successes. In a horrible way, I’m envious. I wish I could be that honest.

The question, I suppose, is how to come to that honesty by a safer path.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







Though I work with homeless teenagers, when I walk through Santa Fe with food and clothes for kids who live on the street, I’m hardly going to refuse a homeless old man who asks for a sandwich. Sure, I’ll tell him about the other resources he has, but hunger is hunger, regardless how old the body is that feels it.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of older homeless men in Santa Fe who refuse to use adult homeless services. Perhaps they don’t want to walk to the Salvation Army or they don’t like the food at the soup kitchen. Or perhaps they just prefer the company of my coworkers and me. They stop by our van every day for food and a chat. I confess that though I love the kids that I work with, these old men annoy me.

As these homeless adults walk away, I always find myself diagnosing them for mental illness. “Did you see those eyes?” I’ll ask my boss. “Major depression if I’ve ever seen it.” Or: “Check out the way he pauses before he answers your questions. He’s hearing voices. Schizophrenia.”

But here’s the thing. I hate diagnoses. It is tremendously disrespectful for me to assume that, just because I have a degree from Harvard, that I know what is going on in someone else’s head better than he does. It’s also just untrue. More significantly, though, I know that on the street, diagnoses just don’t work. People respond much better to kindness and understanding than they do to having a psychiatric box placed around them. Human relations make people happy; diagnoses from a psychology textbook do not.

One day, as I was talking to an old man, I caught myself wondering exactly what kind of schizophrenia he suffered from. My head continued to nod at what he was saying, but my mind wandered elsewhere. I wrenched my attention back to the conversation and forced myself to listen to his words. Finally, as he left, I realized my motivation for these obsessive diagnoses. It wasn’t to help him: I had no way to refer him to a psychiatrist or a hospital. I was doing it, quite simply, because I disliked him. By putting him in this little schizophrenic box, I could dismiss him, preserve the distance between us, but without feeling like I was a bad person for disliking him. It was almost as if by using my knowledge to put him in his place, he would not contaminate me.

Then an even more disturbing realization. I did exactly the same thing when I was an insecure teenager. I attempted to “explain” and “understand” all the kids I didn’t like; that way I could live with them and feel that I was better than they. I wonder how much we can say the same of psychiatry in general.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







As Al Gore and George Bush have begun to make crime an issue in the presidential contest, I have to admit that I am hardly unbiased. The “hard core criminals, drug addicts, and gangsters” they rail against are the kids I work with every day, and from close up, their policies look hopelessly naive.

When I worked in a drop-in center for homeless teenagers in New York City, gangs were a constant problem. I remember a catastrophe last fall, when the Crips and Bloods, national gangs with franchises in midtown Manhattan, had declared war on each other and the Bloods had claimed our center as their territory. They recruited agressively among both boys and girls, and any new recruit suffered two brutal initiation rituals: first he would have to draw blood from an innocent bystander and then the other gangsters would beat him within an inch of his life. Either because it seemed cool or because it was necessary for survival, many kids joined the Bloods.

The gangs extorted money our kids had earned in an internship program. They menaced anyone who dared reveal their actions. Gay kids -- a large percentage of those on the street -- lived in terror, and transgender kids refused to come, even though our kitchen might provide their only nutrition. The Bloods had terrorized the kids, the staff, and many of the businesses in Times Square.

Even though we tried desperately to ask their help, the police gave little aid. Some had little interest in crimes whose victims were street kids. Others despaired when no one would press charges. The beat cop assigned to the street meant well, but he could only be in one place at a time.

One morning, I overheard a conversation between two kids. They let slip that someone who came to our center was the Damu, the leader of the Bloods of midtown. I was shocked: this was one of my favorite clients, a smart, charming, invariably polite young man, even an editor of the magazine I helped the kids publish. Quickly, but also fearfully, I called him in for a talk. Of course he denied any gang involvement, but when I suggested that his charisma gave him a lot of moral authority with the Bloods, he nodded reluctantly.

“You’ve gotten a lot out of this place,” I said with as friendly a tone as I could muster. “We’ve helped you find a job, a house, medical help. And I’ve seen that you’re a big enough guy to be grateful for that.” He nodded, then thanked me for what I had done for him, as he often did. I looked him straight in the eye. “Because of the violence that’s been going on here, nobody -- not poor kids, not gays, not girls, nobody -- can get the help we gave you. Seems a pretty poor way to say thanks.” He looked at me thoughtfully, then I changed the subject.

The next day, thanks to treating the Damu like a human being, the Bloods were gone. Are you listening, Al Gore?

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







Once I’ve developed some sort of trust with the homeless kids I counsel, I try to ask them why they left home. Normally, running away or being kicked out shames kids and makes them feel guilty and weak, but I like the question because it gives us a chance to think about escaping abuse as courageous, as a strength.

Then yesterday, asking that question of a new arrival on the streets of Santa Fe, I got a very different answer. “Honesty,” the young man said. “At home my parents never told the truth. I had to get away.”

I sat back on my heels, unsure of what to say, then slowly I asked him how he was able to be honest on the street, a place where kids have to cheat and steal and sell their bodies to survive. It took him time to explain his logic. Lies, he began, give you power over people. You lie about yourself to impress others, you lie about friends to build up or break down relations, you lie to inspire false confidence that you can then use against other people. That’s why he couldn’t live with his family: they abused the truth as a way to abuse him.

Wanting him to see this honesty as a source of pride, I pushed the subject, asking again how he stayed honest living the hard life of the street. He looked at me as if I’d overlooked the obvious. Lying was about power, he explained once again. On the street, he had no power. He knew he had no power. None at all. So a lie had no use. All that was left was honesty.

Janis Joplin ran through my head: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Was honesty the same, I wondered? When all hope is gone, honesty remains? The conclusion had clearly depressed the young man, and it began to depress me, too.

“I’m just a bad liar,” he finally said, breaking the silence that had descended over the park where we sat talking. “That’s nothing to be proud of.” Then he changed the subject, and fifteen minutes later, he walked off, carrying the food I’d given him.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation incessantly. The street is an object lesson in the maxim that knowledge is power -- or more accurately, convincing someone that you know something, creating the appearance of truth: that’s power. Stories and manipulations are the way that many street kids find jobs, money, food, sex... Clearly, there was a flaw in the young man’s logic: if he chose to lie, he could gain some modicum of power on the street. Then I became even more impressed: he had gotten his story backwards. Though he said that he had no power, therefore he chose not to lie, in fact with his moral decision not to lie, he accepted the consequence of losing that power. Hard as he tried to see it as a weakness, there is a great nobility there. He was not willing to sacrifice his ethics in the mere quest for money, a job, or respect.

This is Kurt Shaw for radio for change dot com.







I got a random call last night. One of the homeless teenagers I had counseled in New York tracked me down. At the same time I left the city to move to Santa Fe, he had joined the Navy, and now, just out of Basic Training, he wanted to process the experience.

Jack’s decision to join the Navy had brought the classic “mixed feelings” for me. On the one hand, of course, it got him off the streets, which had already come close to killing a smart, capable, charismatic kid. Then again, there were the concerns of a lefty pacifist; for me, the military has always been the enemy. But my greatest fear was for Jack’s safety. On the streets of New York, he was flamboyantly gay -- even if he could put up with the Navy, would they put up with him?

While my concerns about violence and imperialism haven’t abated, it turns out that my fear of military homophobia was greatly exaggerated. While I’m not convinced of Jack’s descriptions of the Navy that make it sound like a Men at Work song, it turns out that eight years of a democratic administration have promoted both tolerance and a sense of humor in the Navy. Though Jack hasn’t exactly shouted his sexual orientation from the rooftops, he hasn’t tried to act straight, either. And there haven’t been any problems.

No, it’s even better. Jack’s supervisors have made sure to include in any praise that he is not only a good soldier, but that he is “fabulous.” When he was transferred to a new post, his commanding officer gave him a t-shirt naming him the honorary “Queen of the Regiment.” I could attribute a lot of this to Jack’s charm and charisma, but it also points to real tolerance: not just enforced from above, but embraced. Authentic.

Now, of course this tolerance could flip quickly. The combination of bemused acceptance and ironic humor that Jack described described reminded me of the treatment of Jews in Weimar Germany -- but not Nazi Germany. And news stories indicate that homophobia and sexual harassment still exist in the US military. But let’s be honest: this is a tremendous improvement. Reluctant as I am to praise the people who brought us Mi Lai, the military seems to have made real progress when it comes to tolerance of gays and lesbians. Clearly, they are not taking a leading role, as they did in the case of desegregation, and even more clearly, they still need to improve, but from the perspective of at least one soldier on the ground -- and one temperamentally disposed to criticize -- things look a lot better.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







Last week, a teenager I had counseled two years ago found me in the Santa Fe Plaza. I’m always thrilled to find out what has happened in the lives of homeless kids I had worked with, but this kid’s story made me even happier than normal. He had just returned from a trip around the world, he bragged: working as a cowboy in Australia, trekking the Anapurna circuit in Nepal, backpacking through Thailand. His life had been transformed.

The adventures he described had been my life for several years, though he came to travel as an escape from homelessness and I came to it through a research scholarship. That sudden bridge over the gap between me and homeless kids, the experience we shared, stunned me, made me rethink the work I do.

Most kids end up on the street because of poverty and abuse, but those who stay on the street often do so because they don’t think they fit in mainstream culture. The Australian and Norwegian travelers I used to meet in Quito and Lhasa and Istanbul said the same thing. They too sought adventure and danger as an escape from a culture they found boring and meaningless. Misfit kids from Oslo travel the world; misfit kids from Santa Fe end up on the street.

What about misfits a century ago? Or at other moments in history? I think of young Herman Melville, running away from America as a deck hand on a sailing ship, or the kids who ran off to join the French Foreign Legion, the Spanish second sons who sailed away to conquer America, the hordes of 16 year olds who converged on Sutter’s Mill during the California gold rush. In the year 2000 in the United States, most of these adventurers and explorers might be on the streets, looking to me for a sandwich and some consolation.

Today’s America has no place for its misfits. In a sense, this is obvious: they don’t fit. But it is also tragic. Not long ago, young men who sought rebellion or meaning or escape might find it on a sailing ship, in the wilderness, as part of a conquering horde. I’m thrilled, of course, that disaffected young men no longer go off to kill Indians and Africans, but I wish American society’s obsession with wealth and possessions left some space for young people who want something else.

So today in America, if you are eighteen, a little rebellious, and dissatisfied with mainstream life, there are no sailing ships to find the stories for your future novels. No frontier to explore, no gold to discover. So our Melvilles and Kit Carsons end up on the street, where we call them crazy, delinquents, lazy, gutter punks. Who knows what novelists and explorers we’re losing because we can only offer them the streets.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







Franz Kafka said somewhere that there are two things that are certain. The first is that the messiah will come. The second is that he will come too late. In the last several months, as I’ve been talking with the homeless kids I work with about sexuality, I’ve been wondering if the cynical, comic author wasn’t right on.

For the last 30 years, more or less since the New York Police raided the gay bar Stonewall in the late sixties, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders -- a whole series of gender minorities -- have struggled to be seen as human beings, not “deviants” or “sinners” or whatever other words conformists and religious conservatives could invent. Since I wasn’t even alive when Martin Luther King was in Selma, and I barely remember the ERA, this has been the civil rights struggle of my lifetime.

And, in spite of slow progress in many places, the struggle has been victorious. Not only in employment, accommodations, and the more formal aspects of civil rights law, but also in the daily attitudes of many, perhaps even most Americans. Even the Republican Party has toned down it’s gay bashing rhetoric. Certainly we have a long way to go, but I’d much rather be a gay teenager today than just ten years ago.

So, if the metaphorical gay rights messiah has not come, at least he’s sent a note to say he’s on the way. The problem, say the street kids I work with, is that it really doesn’t matter any more.

What? you ask. How can sexual orientation not matter? One of the great lessons of feminism and gay liberation is that sexuality is essential to our being. The kids I work with agree, and they’re certainly more aware about their sex than I was, but they don’t get what “sexual identity” could possibly mean.

One of the optional questions we ask any homeless kid when he comes to get food or take a shower or just get out of the cold, is whether he identifies as straight, gay, or bisexual. It’s not a question I like to ask, but our funders like to know that kind of information, and they hold the purse strings. But recently, I’ve met many, many runaways and street kids who have no idea how to answer that question.

I talked with a kid who I knew slept with both boys and girls, so I suggested that “bisexual” might be the right answer. He thought a while, then said that didn’t feel right. He had no interest in bisexual or gay culture; that wasn’t his identity. Finally, he said he wasn’t hetero- or homo- or bi- sexual. He was just sexual. We left it at that.

This boy was white. A street kid. Hardly representative of American culture. The Latinos I work with here and the blacks I worked with in New York would not have shared his attitude. Even so, something is changing in how Americans understand sexuality. I’m just not sure what it is.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







“Why you be hatin’ me?”

When I first heard this bit of teen argot from the homeless kids I work with, I have to admit I was confused. The phrase might come from the mouth of a young man who’d just seduced the local beauty or from a young woman who’d gotten a job or found a way off the street. Others might have envied them, or been jealous, but they said, “Why you be hatin’ me?” What did it have to do with hate?

Finally, after I’d asked many times, one of the hip hop cognoscenti condescended to explain the phrase to me. “Hatin’,” he told me, had come from “playa hatin’,” a playa being a guy who scored with lots of girls. A “playa hata” envied the success of someone else. “Hatin’” could manifest itself as a jealous glance (the postmodern urban version of the evil eye), nasty gossip, or even sabotage to drag the playa back into the mire.

At first, I got mad at school systems which never managed to teach “envy” as a vocabulary word, but over the past year, homeless kids in New York and Santa Fe have convinced me that “playa hatin’” is actually a useful concept.

Let me step back a bit. Or a century, to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Christianity, Nietzsche said, the poor and weak had found a powerful tool. They had always hated the strong and rich people who oppressed them, but with this new religion, they could claim that God loved only the humble and the meek. The proud and the strong were not only powerful, but evil. Gradually, Nietzsche claimed, the idea that strong was evil and weak was good became so pervasive that the weak could overcome the strong and impose a system based on what he called “slave morality.” With weakness turned into a virtue, all that was good and noble about humanity began to crumble, leaving us in the pit of misery Nietzsche saw in 1880s Germany.

Now, the history of Christianity is, of course, much more complicated than Nietzsche hypothesized, but here’s my point. Nietzsche’s Christians are the original playa hatas. Sure, Nietzsche used a different word (the French term “ressentiment”, which always looks strange in the midst of his strong, almost brutal prose), but his message was basically the same as the homeless kid who’s just gotten a job: “Don’t be hatin’ me.”

Even in Nietzsche’s historical facts are a bit off, his critique of playa hatin’ is not. Whether at work, in our families, or in our communities, success often inspires resentment, more than just envy, a perverse desire to sabotage people who have made their own way. I saw it in grad school, I see it in the social service agencies where I have worked, I see it whenever anyone escapes a culture of poverty. And it hurts not only the playa who we hate, but all of us.

So listen to the street kids. Don’t be hatin’.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







If you know where to go in Zona Siete of Guatemala City, a desperately poor neighborhood southwest of downtown, you can step out onto a cliff and to see the city dump in the ravine below. Thousands of vultures circle above. Smoke climbs up from the many fires that burn in the depths of the trash. Putrid smells gag any observer, even 500 feet above the trucks that drive slowly down the walls of the ravine. Then, as you look more closely, you see figures chasing each truck, then more scattered through the several square miles of trash. Thousands of people, literally thousands, who survive by picking through the garbage. They pay the truck drivers for the right to search their load, then sell whatever they can find.

Choking from the smoke and the stench, I squirmed back through the gate and walked over to a little abandoned church on the edge of the dump. Joyful children’s shouts emerged from the filthy concrete walls. As I walked inside, several threw themselves on me: “read that fairy tale again, please, please!” demanded one. “And do the voices! You have to do the voices!”

These children live in the dump. Their houses are made of reclaimed garbage. Their families, if they have them, pick through the trash from dawn to dusk. Their dinner is often reclaimed from a garbage truck. Simply to have survived into their fourth year is a miracle, because half of all infants die before their first birthday. Half.

In spite of conditions that make Dante’s Hell seem like summer in Miami, the kids laugh. Thanks to a small program in the abandoned church called Safe Passage, they also have a couple of clean meals a day, and vitamins that may help them resist the thousands of infections that fill the dump -- one of which still has my throat in its grip. Safe Passage also teaches reading and art and the simple pre-school skills that no one ever learns in the dump: how to play with others, how to listen to a story, how to wash your hands when they’re dirty.

Public schools in Guatemala have always refused to educate dump kids, rather like the white schools of America fifty years ago who turned black children away at the door. Safe Passage is working to change that. The director spends most of her days with principals and teachers and guidance counselors, cajoling and threatening and arguing to get the kids into school. The director is American, blond, and tall, so from time to time they hear her pleas. For the first time, dump kids are in school. They have a chance -- not a good chance, but a chance -- to escape the dump.

Here, perhaps, is the most amazing thing. The organization I run gave Safe Passage $3000. It turns out this money will keep them going for three months, serving 100 kids a day. A place where a little money does mean a lot. So, I’m going to break my policy of not pitching particular organizations. Email hanleydenning@hotmail dot com to see how you can help.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







You probably remember San Cristobal de las Casas from six years ago. It’s the colonial city in the south of Mexico where the Zapatista National Liberation Army first appeared on television screens, where Maya rebels with ski masks and wooden rifles staged the first postmodern revolution.

Though there hasn’t been violence for quite some time, the Zapatistas are still in arms in the mountains around San Cristobal, so I have to admit to a little trepidation as my bus reached the city at sunrise. But war means refugees, and refugees mean street kids, and on a trip to research homeless children in Mexico, I could hardly avoid a city just because it was in the middle of a war zone.

The greatest surprise was not the street kids, not even the little masked dolls of Subcomandante Marcos they sold on the street. It was the tourists: thousands and thousands of white faces with long hair or tangled dreadlocks, pierced noses, Guatemalan backpacks, the sort of young people I would have expected to see at the WTO protests in Seattle. I’d traveled in war zones before, but in Colombia or western Turkey, I was the only foreigner to be seen. Here, suddenly, war had become a tourist attraction.

In a sense, we should have expected this. Taking San Cristobal got the Zapatistas on the news, but since 1994, they’ve fought most of their battles on the internet. Subcomandante Marcos, an instant charismatic icon with his proud posture and pipe, posted witty communiques on the web, full of references to Shakespeare and Cervantes. For the young, tech-savy left -- the children of a world so comfortable it has become boring and meaningless -- there could be no greater hero. Of course they had come to San Cristobal. It was a pilgrimage.

Now, I don’t want my ironic tone to turn San Cristobal into the stage for a farce. Truth is, most Mexicans I talked to said that the Zapatistas were the biggest reason for the fall of the notoriously corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party this summer. And many of the young people I met -- nose ringed women from Barcelona, hippies from Denmark, lesbians from Norway -- turned their revolutionary fantasies into good works, piping potable water into remote villages, monitoring human rights violations, teaching poor kids to read. Even so, war tourism: it makes me laugh.

It turns out that the sixties radicals were wrong. The revolution will be televised. And webcast. And thousands of tourists will flock to the site, desperate for a moment when historical events feel real, for a place where courage matters and their work can mean something more than profits for a multinational corporation. And there, in the middle of the revolution, street children will sell them masked dolls of Subcomandante Marcos.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







The packed auditorium in a suburb south of Mexico City had waited patiently through the long panel discussion on defending the human rights of homeless children. The tension had been palpable, and all eyes had rested on the short, rotund man in the middle of the stage. Flashbulbs lit the air while reporters filled page after page with notes. It reminded me of the press conference of a reclusive rock star, who had come out of hiding to promote a cause that mattered to her, but where the press and public just wanted to feel her aura.

As the last words of the conversation died out, the audience literally rushed the stage, cameras clicking, voices shouting questions. And Samuel Ruiz, the Bishop of Chiapas, gently pushed away the crowd so he could talk with three ten year olds. Their hyperactive eyes showed that they had lived several years on the street, but now their pens danced gaily across their notebooks. They wrote for a newspaper for street kids, and it appeared that Bishop Ruiz had granted them an exclusive interview.

In spite of my virulent opposition to hero worship, I have to admit this pushed me over the edge. Ignoring television cameras to answer the questions of homeless children is about as close as we can get to sainthood in the postmodern world.

Samuel Ruiz, for those of you who don’t keep up on Latin American politics, changed the history of Mexico. As Bishop of Chiapas, he sent hundreds of catechists and teachers to the small Maya villages in the mountains, telling them to teach not the pope or the cross, but the real message of Jesus: to proclaim good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, and to demand the release of prisoners and freedom for the oppressed. He also insisted that Mayan traditions and religion were a gift of God, not to be ignored or dismissed. Over the course of the last several decades, those lessons turned to pride, then into resistance to the rich and powerful, finally into the Zapatista rebellion and the fall of the Mexican government in elections this summer.

And then, after changing history, he preferred to talk with poor children than take credit for it. Skip Mother Teresa: Samuel Ruiz has my vote for patron saint of the third world.

The scene in the auditorium made me happy: not just the aura of a great man, but also the fact that the Mexicans had chosen a worthy hero. But it also made me pensive: How long has it been since Americans were able to look up to someone in the same way? Probably not since Martin Luther King was murdered. Since then, we’ve been cursed with Charles Barkley and Madonna for heroes. What is missing in America? Why don’t we have a Samuel Ruiz?

Perhaps we don’t know where to look. Or perhaps saints just show up where they’re needed most.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







Last week, one of the homeless kids I work with came into the drop in center elated. A friend had loaned him a snowboard and taken him up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin, and the experience had left a smile on his face that I didn’t think even surgery could remove.

“You’re not just dead?” I asked, remembering my first day on a snowboard, where a zillion flips over my toe-side edge had left bruises on my palms and sorer muscles than anything else I could remember.

His smile grew a touch more thoughtful. “Sure, I crashed a lot, but I’m good at falling.”

Several days later, the same kid came in. Perhaps he had gone to the plastic surgeon, I thought at first, because that permanent smile had been completely effaced. We talked for a while, played a game of chess, and finally, slowly, the truth began to come out. The sort of truth that fulfills everyone’s nightmare.

Several months before, an acquaintance had invited him and his girlfriend to sleep on his floor for the winter. At the time, it had seemed a kind gesture. But then, yes, the hero of my story walked in on his girlfriend and their host. Naked. In bed.

My heart contracted. He moved his knight to put my king in check.

“I’m so impressed with how you’re handling this,” I said, reaching for any good thing to say, any silver lining to the blackest cloud a young man can have pass in front of the sun.

“Remember what I told you?” he asked. “I’m good at falling.”

If there’s any truth to the old saw about how suffering builds character, it’s in those few words. And unfortunately, because life has become so easy for most middle and upper class Americans, we have no chance to learn how to fall. I imagine an average kid thrown into the same circumstances -- he would demand years of therapy, a prescription for Zoloft, and a new puppy. For a kid who’s been homeless for years, who’s been knifed in the back by his father -- sure, the experience is further evidence that life sucks, but it does not destroy him.

On the streets, among the orphans, the girls who were sexually abused for years, the gay boys kicked out of the house by their dads, and children from families too poor to support them, there are also some rich kids. The life of Jack Kerouac seems romantic to them, and they might talk about the joys of the open road, but in truth, they want to learn how to fall. Most children from American families have no chance to find out what they’re made of, to see if they are worthy of themselves.

So in the end, there’s a simple lesson and a more complicated application. We all need to learn how to fall better -- the question is how.

Maybe I’ll try snowboarding again.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







Unite ye workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains!

The famous words of Karl Marx, applied badly in dozens of countries over the course of a century, did little to advance the sort of utopian communism he dreamed of. Oddly enough, though, the last several years of multinational corporate money grubbing have given more hints of real communism than the Soviet Union ever did.

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about anything that will touch you and me. It’s about the lives of the homeless teenagers I work with. Believe it or not, the world of multinational capitalism has brought them untold benefits.

Let’s just go through the course of a day for a street kid in Santa Fe. She wakes up in the morning -- perhaps in a tent in the mountains above town, perhaps on a friend’s couch, perhaps in someone else’s bed -- we have to be honest that this is hardly utopia -- then walks across town to the local McDonalds. Since teenagers are social beings, in Marx’s great phrase, she knows the clerk behind the counter. “Think you can set me up?” A couple of Egg McMuffins appear on the counter, no payment necessary.

This being Santa Fe, our heroine walks downtown to sit in a coffee shop for a while. She doesn’t know the barista at Starbucks, but after a quick conversation, a bit of flirting, and a confession of backrupcy, he gives her the tall mocha latte for free. She sits down with a discarded copy of the New York Times and wiles away the morning.

Bored, she walks over to the ski area access road and sticks out her thumb -- since hitching to ski is a time honored tradition in Santa Fe, it’s an easy trip up to the ski area, where a friend hooks her up with a free snowboard from the rental shop, and the homeless or nearly homeless kids who staff the lift lines let her slide by without a ticket.

We can imagine lunch and dinner working the same way -- by going to fast food restaurants where she knows the cashiers, it’s free. Unfortunately, sleep is still a problem -- she’ll have to head back to her tent, hoping that no one nicked her sleeping bag.

I don’t want to set up a dream lifestyle here, because it’s clearly not -- at night, being a kid on the street is a horrible thing, and the payment for a hamburger or a free snowboard can be even more exploitative than money. But in the world of multinational capital, it is possible to depend on the kindness of strangers. The cashier at McDonalds has no interest in their corporate profits, and how can one steal coffee from Starbucks? They’re richer than Croeses. There’s no guilt involved there, it’s not even stealing.

What does this mean for the world? For politics? For the promise of communism? I’m not sure. But what is certain is that capital has destroyed a certain sort of ethics, responsibility, loyalty. For street kids, that’s a great thing. For the rest of us? I’m not so sure.

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.







Beneath the arcas de lapa, the famous viaduct that soars through Rio de Janeiro, several poor families had set up shacks of sticks and tin. Police officers often came to tear them down or to beat the homeless people, but when your house is made of cardboard, it’s easy to rebuild, so they were back each morning. They made a living by collecting cans, recycling paper, selling bubble gum on street corners.

Somehow, one of those families had found an ancient leather couch, and as the sun set over the statue of Cristo Redentor, two girls and their little brother jumped up and down as if the couch were a trampoline, singing the latest samba of the just finished Carnaval. Their joy felt like spit in the face of the devil, a vibrant manifesto that poverty need not mean misery. After six weeks in Brazil, I wanted to take it as a metaphor for the country: laughter against suffering, songs against death.

A reporter appeared under the arches, a notebook in one hand, a camera in the other. The children’s mother, who had stood in the front of the shack, eyes peeled for police on the other side of the plaza, pushed the reporter away. She’d seen the TV news last night -- in Brazil, everyone watches the TV news -- so she knew the media had no sympathy for the homeless. “No, no,” the reporter explained, “I want to tell your side of the story.” For a time they argued, then merely talked; finally the mother relented. She would let him take a picture of the children.

During the argument, the children continued to bounce and sing, now moving on to another samba: “você pagou com traição!” but the reporter asked them to stop, to sit down, to show how much poverty had made them suffer. But the children couldn’t. In the middle of the misery, they were happy. Camera or no camera.

Why, I wonder, are we so motivated by pity? The reporter did want to take the side of the poor, he wanted a story to end the police brutality, to encourage the construction of a homeless shelter. And he knew that rich Brazilians, like Americans, don’t want to help happy children. We want to help miserable children, to pity them. “Stop jumping! I want to take a picture!”

What a cruel form of charity, to demand misery before we will help. It’s a challenge to you, to me, to compassionate people everywhere: how can we be motivated by justice instead of pity? How can we get kids a house and still let them dance?

This is Kurt Shaw for Radio for Change dot com.