The Canaries of Inequality

I thought this odd looking erection was part of the annual Sculpture Key West efforts but that annual shrunken extravaganza has evaporated once again and this thing, looking for all the world like a fried calamari ring past its due date, remains. It turns out it makes a passable reclining bench upon which one waits for one's dog to lose interest in it.

Winter is a time of tourists at Higgs Beach, the county's park in the. Idle of the city. It's a place that is patrolled by an off duty Sheriff's deputy and order has been maintained for the pleasure of beach goers. One brilliant solution to the problem of co-habitation between beach overs and the residentially challenged was to outlaw adults at the park benches fronting the beach.

The homeless who come to Key West in droves for the winter season decamped across the road to the tables covered by smaller roofs next to the dog park, another area closed off to homeless "campers," by virtue of a fenced in area created by public subscription.

When Cheyenne and I were passing we could hear another fish story changing hands, "it was THIS big" he told his Cuban buddies out with their dogs.

Cheyenne is a hot property, and I know this because she walks past people's homes and their trapped dogs bay to be let out to play with her, a game of frolic invariably denied by fearful owners. In the dog park Cheyenne was free to frolic so she decided that was a mugs game and ignored all advances. Good girl.

She, like me, prefers to watch.

And while she watches I like to observe and photograph.

Higgs Beach and the White Street Pier and neighboring Rest Beach are the closest Key West comes to a Third Spaces where people like to gather outdoors. Third place - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Of course some people need to exercise and this is where they can do that too.

It's not surprising considering the beauty of the place and the presence of an actual sand beach, after a fashion. Sand is rare in the rocky Keys.

Some exercise, some rest and some live in public. It's euphemistically called "camping."

These places close at eleven pm and open at seven am or thereabouts and they are patrolled by the night watch to clear these spaces of "campers." Under Florida law the municipality must provide a safe place for people to sleep before they can be moved on, and Key West does that with the Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter- KOTS. Key West Diary: Homeless In Key West

The safe zone, as KOTS is also known, is about to undergo change with a more permanent structure under consideration to provide services as well as sleeping arrangements. However for some, homelessness is a way of life, a choice not just a misfortune or a mental illness. In a town with a perfect climate it's hard to deny that there wil be people here who sleep rough.

In the middle of the continuing debate we have public spaces, bike trails, parks and beaches and if they have facilities they get overrun. State Parks with their entrance fees are exceptions and thus become the refuge of the moderately well to do. City parks are home to the least among us, including pigeons.

I like stopping off in these spaces because I feel it's important to reclaim them for those of us that seek not to live here but to rest and enjoy them for a moment in our lives.

In a town as expensive as Key West there are bound to be working poor and there are always the confused who come to "the tropics" as a refuge from hardship Up North and fail to bring the means or the skills with them to find a place here. It's understandable that residents, some wealthy and some barely hanging on resent in some manner or another those that live "for free" in their midst. The homeless taken as a stereotype also put fear in our hearts, as an Awful Reminder of what awaits those of us that fail to submit and work and who don't keep the implicit promise not to upset the social apple cart.

To me homelessness represents boredom, and I am as capable as any of spending my days in idleness, but only so long as it is at my own behest. Were I so reduced that all I could forward to would be days of pointlessness I think I should go mad. I don't view living "for free" as any kind of freedom, emotional or economic.

The social stigma of not paying one's way is extreme in a country that lives by the myth of self reliance. Poverty in America is a moral failing, as mad as that sounds.

We lack the desire to spend our public monies building and maintaining public works, and we pay the price. Bridges collapse and more bridges threaten collapse and the public outrage is nowhere to be found. Eisenhower's America is dead buried and forgotten. We are told that the public debt is so large we are facing imminent collapse as a nation, yet we keep soldiers all around the world and we build vast spacious embassies overseas and we pay mercenaries ten times what we pay our own honest soldiers to represent us in battles that hold no interest for us or purpose for our modest lives.

We are told that half our national debt was generated by the war in the Middle East, the war that secured Iraqi oil for American corporations that pay us no taxes in return. There is no public outcry because failure to pay taxes is seen as smart and clever and in defiance of a government that keeps us under surveillance. It's an extraordinary narrative so well told that even as its effects prove it to be a lie, it's victims continue to believe it.

Yet the homeless and hopeless are the objects of moral outrage. These people who live on pennies are blamed for our national ills. The narrative put about by the one percent say it must be so, so it must be so. I find it absolutely extraordinary.

I read comments by Canadians who whine about the high cost of living Up North and I wonder at their lack of awareness. Mind you Americans down here are less aware of their neighbor to the North than anyone so it's a two way street. Yet the essential civility of the nation to the north of us, devoted to the public good must be paid for, in gas taxes GST, PST and sales taxes and value added taxes. Sales taxes in Canada - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The benefits are obscured to many as they look south and see us frolicking tax free. Yet we face economic bankruptcy at every turn in a life filled with stress and anxiety, high fructose corn syrup and mutual disgust. We all of us, liberals and conservatives and libertarians, can lose everything to a bad accident or major disease, yet we cannot agree on a way out of our dependence on insurance companies that deny us medical coverage at every turn.

It is said that a society can be judged by how it treats the least of its citizens, or better yet how it treats it's animals. The pervasive narrative in the US tells us that if we provide the services other industrialized countries provide "they" will live off the fat of the land and not contribute. They are the stereotypes of your choosing, minorities of all stripes of course. Animals we herd in "feed lots," really manure pits and squeeze chickens cows and pigs into torture chambers and feed them drugs to make them fat, and us in turn.

And through it all we blame the government, not the corporations that buy the government at our expense. The narrative is brilliant, and as brilliant as it is flawed. My wife, desperately grateful for her health insurance that keeps her rheumatoid arthritis at bay was brought to her knees by the sight of a man sitting out with a leg in a cast and stuffed paper money into his startled hands. A band aid, even as she seeks her own path off the dependence on chemicals, the very things that enable her to function while enabling Merck to overcharge her insurance.

My only hope is that throughout history when this country has taken a wrong turn after sufficient agony has been felt we have found our way back, usually somewhat peacefully and usually before too much damage has been done. There's something wrong when poverty is a moral failing yet to hoard wealth beyond imagining is viewed as a social good. Throughout history such inequalities have led to violent social change.

How we treat this conundrum of homelessness, poverty, lack of education, wealth inequality and a failure of public discourse is all predicated by the canaries in the social coal mine, the indicators of a society headed in the wrong direction, the modest, despised homeless in our midst.

 

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D Day 2013

Pictures from the Web.

Key West Street Scenes

I started this blog in June 2007 as an experiment. Six years later I have almost 3200 essays logged here, almost all of them photo essays with between one and two dozen pictures. I have avoided formatting anything so I could avoid having to come up with blue pictures for Monday or wooden pictures for Friday or any such limitation. I just do what I feel like doing and throw in my opinions because this is after all my diary of my life in the Lower Keys.

I have previously explained the reason why I started this blog, partly in disgust at the food fights and name calling so popular on open Internet fora and partly too because when I started exploring the Internet looking for blogs that might illustrate places of interest to me, so few appeared. I figured why not try to show Key West as it is; or at least how I see it.

Above we have Telegraph Lane which runs behind Rick's Bar on Duval Street a minor alley beautifully paved not leas because it serves the business of a Very Important Person. There are quite a few Key West streets that could use some repaving, but so far no luck for them. The gate shown below was demolished by a motorist so drove into at full speed I believe down Caroline Street and across the stop sign at Whitehead. As I recall the gate won, but even so it is taking an age to fix.

Key West streets are unique to Florida, St Augustine comes close but nowhere else has retained the intimacy and history of this tourist town even with its drinking problem.

Cheyenne loves walking anywhere in town, a place filled with vitality and alluring scents even at ankle height or lower. She gets to hydrate as she goes thanks to the myriad water bowls littering the sidewalks all over the place. Some are fancy like this one others aren't, but she isn't picky when it's eighty degrees and humid.

I prefer Duval Street early in the morning when people are few and crowds aren't elbowing me and my dog off the sidewalk. In the picture below it looms lie it just rained. It hadn't, they just like to use fresh water to clean the city. We are told the 75,000 permanent residents of the Keys and their associated businesses have no perceptible impact on the flow of potable water out of the Soith Florida aquifer. Just as well as the millions of mainland residents are working hard to dry it all up.

I love walking the streets of Key West and it's an activity highly recommended to visitors. With reason.

Every street, Greene Street below, is a center of life and activity, human or of plant life. Full of color.

Greene Street is named for Pardon Greene one of the four Anglo purchasers of the island from the original Spanish owner. Juan Salas got the island as a land grant from the Spanish king and did nothing with it, except to sell it (twice) to eager Americans. Below we see the city public works department cleaning Duval for another day of riotous living and another night of riotous drinking.

Mallory Square as can only be seen by the early bird visitor. Stephen Mallory was US Secretary of the Navy who subsequently joined the Confederate cabinet of Jefferson Davis. Which act did not convince anyone to change the name of the principal trading area of Key West harbor.

It was an historic day for me, being the first time I ever drove my car onto Mallory Square and parked there. At four dollars an hour I expect it it will also be the last time. Paradise don't come cheap.

 

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Tiring My Dog On And Off Love Lane

I am not a fan of Facebook. I have an account, I think, but I find it intrusive to a degree that irritates me, and yet it is also a space that doesn't allow for reflection or extended thoughts.others disagree with me, billions of people actually like Facebook.

I tried Instagram too until I discovered it was overrun by Facebook and he they wanted to make money off the pictures submitted to the service. That got my allergies running rampant so I dumped Instagram.

I like my own page on the Web, my place to despoil my pictures, my ruminations and my memories. It is not an easy thing for people to maintain a web page it seems, a arrangement that I find relaxing and thus self perpetuating. Love Lane Jack used to keep a rhyming blog, a page unique among the unique, a thing of particular interest, a mish mash of pictures and politics and blasphemy all mixed in with insight and humor. above Solaris Hill .

The page is gone, left for dead on the electronic battlefield of ideas and in its place Jack has forged ahead on the dreaded Facebook. Whatever works I am sad to say, but I miss the ribald irreverent thought provoking poetry on the new page. (2) Love Lane Jack

Life goes on and so does my eleven year old Labrador.

I thought of the following picture as a study in white, the peculiar lengthened Conch cottage, added on as money and desire allowed. Not exactly McMansions!

A vast spacious empty lot, devoid of parked cars except the elderly and still bright scarlet Alfa Romeo Spyder.

The idea of one human family gets a tad bit frayed around the edges from time to time but I did like humor the sticker posted over a defaced No Trespassing sign.

This cheerful dumpster sits in Fausto's paking lot, to cheer up grocery customers. Faustos Key West | Home

This sign caused me to chuckle. Oops! Scaring off the customers won't work!

My sense of humor causes me to enjoy irony even in death, that most fearsome affliction of even the faithful. Death comes to us all but Trespassing on it is frowned upon at Key West's largest funeral home. From time to time of course I have to call out the on duty undertaker when police officers come across a body. No matter how ungodly the hour the voice answering the undertaker's phone is always a voice of a man wide awake, calm, and ready to help. I have great admiration for undertakers, they deal with people in terrible shape and they do it superbly.

The Federal Building on Simonton Street is lovely in its limestone magnificence and then your eyes are drawn to the ghastly security measures that demean the beauty and solidity, as though this were a fortified foreign legation not a customs and court house dispensing the Law.

This lovely grassy knoll is a few blocks from the Federal Building. In point of fact it is across Lazy Way Lane from Schooner Wharf Bar.

The former model home for the proposed development by a group of failed local investors has been torn down to make ready for a new hotel. Oh well, the open space will be nice as long as it lasts.

I frequently come across dog walkers who fear an encounter with my happy Labrador. Dogs are the gods of frolic but so few of their owners know it. En garde!

Gecko, anole, or miniature iguana. You decide.

An elderly Cuban dude rolled up on a bicycle while my dog was rooting around in his bicycle parking spot and I was busy taking a picture of yet another pair of abandoned shoes. Where do they all come from, I ask myself?

The Cuban dude smiled as I reeled in my errant dog. At first I thought he was, as everyone is, afraid of my hound. Instead he kept smiling at her happy face, parked his bike and sloped off into his house. Cheyenne and I went back to Love Lane to find the car.

Key West Diary: Love Lane

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