It's time we all got involved
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
The contrast is everywhere. It's in the newspapers, in the ads for designer clothes and expensive skin creams laid out right next to reports of American children who go to school hungry.
It's in the landscape, in the sagging tenements that line the edge of American highways, where shiny new cars with deluxe audio systems and cruise control speed indifferently past.
It's in our cities and our towns, people in dress coats walking next to people in rags; the privileged hurrying to the theater and to symphony, the underprivileged going nowhere that isn't free.
It's in our schools, divided into private and public, city and suburban. In our work places, in our lifestyles, in our movies, in our books and in our songs.
It's everywhere we turn - not just abroad anymore. It's not just south of the border or across a sea, but here in our own backyards: The haves and have nots, the rich and the poor, black and white, them and us. Divided we stand.
And divided we will fall.
One girl cries because a boy she likes doesn't like her. Another girl sobs because the boy she likes was killed on his way to school.
One boy packs a suitcase and goes to summer camp. Another boy packs a gun and roams the streets.
One child goes to school in clean clothes with a full stomach. Another wears the clothes she slept in and school lunch is her only meal of the day.
It happens. It happens all the time in this land of plenty. One nation, under God, isn’t one nation anymore.
"Grand Canyon," voted best picture of the year at the Berlin Film Festival, is about the chasm that exists in this country between the rich and the poor. It's a remarkable film because it doesn't invent. It simply holds up a mirror and shows us what we see every day.
Only in the movie we really see. We see a guy on his way home from a Laker's game, stuck in long line of stalled traffic doing what many of us would do. He turns down an unfamiliar street, then down another and still another and ends up getting lost and breaking down in a part of the city that is a suburb of Hell.
The streets are littered with broken down cars. The storefronts are boarded up or have grills on the windows. The streetlights are burned out. Paper and debris define the place, and there is little traffic and no pedestrians at all.
The contrasts continue. A good-looking, middle-aged woman with a comfortable life and a house in the best part of town jogs every day past street people who sleep in crates.
A young secretary with a secure job and a nice life frets because her married boss isn't in love with her, while a young black woman with a menial job is traumatized - her house shot up, her windows shattered, her doors riddled with bullets while she and her young daughter are in it.
A movie producer is shot on his own production lot, and almost bleeds to death, not because some thief wants his Rolex but because mounting anger at injustice continues to lead to violence and violence knows no boundaries.
This movie the nightly news. It's life in the big city. It's the way things are today. It's America, 1992, disparate and out of control.
So what can we do? Once we know, once we see, once we look into a vagrant's eyes, once we recognize that a child is hungry, that a woman has no place to live, that a man is hated because of his skin color, that millions of Americans don't get enough to eat, what are we supposed to do?
Normand Dugas, owner of the Black Point Inn in Prout's Neck, Maine, summer home to many of New England's elite, is giving his inn away Mothers Day weekend to guests who make a donation, comparable to the cost of the weekend, to Food for the Poor.
"Here we are luxuriating up here, while so many people are hurting," Dugas says.
My grandmother who hardly had enough money for herself, used to tuck dollar bills into plain white envelopes and mail them to Father Flanagan's Boystown every week of her life.
"Why do you do that, Nana?"
"Because there are people worse off than I am," she would always say.
Some people can do more than others, but everyone can do something. Everyone can vote for social justice. Everyone can reach out, help out, volunteer, get involved, stop hating, start giving back.
Everyone can work to change that which left alone and ignored will grow into a canyon so huge it will end up dividing us all.
