Oh, The Places You Won't Go

June 9, 2000

In the display case on the outside wall of the Washington Square United Methodist Church is the following sentiment from Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Today I will be talking about points Two and Four.

This past Tuesday night, I was conducting AWOL boards for the ne’er-do-wells of my National Guard infantry company. Four out of the five guys listed as AWOL on my manifest failed to show up for this disciplinary hearing. What to do with them was easy. I signed the forms which would discharge them from the army. The fifth person showed up and stood meekly before me with his head down and his voice low.

Rather than light this guy up, I told him to sit down and tell me what was going on. "Why haven’t you been showing up for drill?"

What followed was a cold dose of reality. This guy was 20-years-old; young and strong, but completely broken in spirit. An old, beaten man in a near-child’s body. A poor kid of mixed black and Hispanic heritage, he was from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. At sixteen, his mother sent him away to a camp for "at-risk" youth. It was either that or the streets, because she told him he couldn’t come home anymore. After that he went to basic training at Fort Benning and joined the Guard so that he could get money to go to trade school. But no sooner had he started class than he got his girlfriend pregnant. Now his "baby’s mother" lives in Los Angeles with his son. He dropped out of school and works six nights a week as a security guard at a valet parking lot in Manhattan. What money he makes goes to his responsibility out in California and to the tokens he needs to get to and from work. It’s not that he doesn’t want to come to drill, he just can’t make the time.

This guy has no education, a subsistence-level job, a child across the country, a simple room that his still-nagging mother reluctantly agreed to let him use "for a little while." Now he was facing a dishonorable discharge from the National Guard…a stigma that would stay with him for the rest of his life and one which would cause him to be automatically disqualified for any city, state, or federal civil service job.

"Well," I began, "the fact that you showed up tonight shows that you care." I went on to tell him that, I, being a new commander, would give him a clean slate, but that if he were AWOL again, I would have to discharge him. I helped him make arrangements with his parking lot manager so that he could make up the time and I told him that the guys in our unit would try to hook him up with a decent civilian job. "And who knows," I concluded, "if you get your act together and stay consistent for a year, I’ll recommend you for active duty…if that’s something you want." (At least there he’d have food, clothes, shelter, and a regular income.)

He swore that he would turn the corner and I told him I’d see him at our next drill. We parted company both feeling better.

After he left the room, I let out a sigh, said goodnight to my First Sergeant, and headed across town to the PATH station. Along the way I stopped by a bar / restaurant where a friend of mine works--a pretty upscale place on 19^th and Park.

As I sat talking to him at the bar, two young guys walked in. Well-dressed and cocky. Their unlined faces indicated both their youth and their lack of troubles. They talked to each other and yapped on their cell phones. After a few minutes of eavesdropping, I gathered that these guys were planning a series of wild parties. One each month for twelve months, each in an exotic location. I’m not talking Bayonne, New Jersey. These guys were planning parties in Egypt, India, Japan, and Rio DeJaneiro.

On and on they talked about how the food was just "atrocious" at some place in Cairo, how that last party in Berlin rocked, and how some club in midtown needs to do a better job of keeping out the riff-raff from the VIP section.

"They’re loaded," my friend leaned over and whispered across the bar. "They come here a lot. Always talking on their cell phones. Their dads are big Wall Street guys and they’re living off big trust funds. You should see the girls they usually have with them. I mean amazing."

We shook our heads silently.

"Fuck ‘em" I finally grunted above my Jack and Coke.

My friend smiled. "Yeah, fuck ‘em."

I was angry and jealous and disgusted.

Ten minutes earlier, I’d dealt with a kid who had nothing and was trying to scrape together a life. Now there were these two guys who’d never been in a scrape in their life. A kid who had only been out of New York to go to basic training in Georgia, and guys who regularly flew around the world on a lark to drink and get laid.

Unfair is hardly the word for it.

True, no one, rich or poor, has a say as to which family they are born into. But, like Gandhi said, "wealth without work" is so very repugnant. And these guys going on and on so publicly about their jet-set lifestyle certainly exemplified "pleasure without conscience."

I started to think stupid thoughts about how we could go about shaking up the whole social order. But I quickly dismissed those ridiculous ideas. They were futile. There’s nothing you can do about it. And who I am kidding? I’d love to have enough money to be able to travel the globe and do exciting things. But hopefully, if I ever did earn that kind of cash, I would always remember where I came from.

As for the sons and daughters of wealth and privilege, they can’t remember where they’ve never been.

Broadway Jim Sosnicky