BY FELECIA THEUNE, PH.D.
It’s early Sunday evening and I get caught in the downtown traffic of satisfied Miami Heat fans leaving American Airlines Arena on Biscayne Boulevard after another victory. Panhandlers, some in hand-me-down Heat t-shirts, beg for spare change but are largely ignored, as are a seemingly growing homeless population who make their home along NE 6th Street. A woman who looks to be in her 50s catches my eye as she plays with two dolls while a man cozies up next to her.
This is the real Miami – a city of paradoxes where spectacular wealth lives side by side with dire poverty. In the shadows of downtown high-rise condos, $100,000 cars, partying all night on South Beach and endless days of sunshine are run-down public housing, low student achievement, sleepless nights of grumbling stomachs, and neighborhoods of dead-end streets that lead to nowhere. Approximately 20.4% of Miami’s population lives below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the Gladeview neighborhood, 45% of the residents are poor. It’s not much better in Brownsville (43%), Little Havana (43%), Overtown (42%), Florida City (39%) and Little Haiti (37%). Affluent Coral Gables and Pinecrest are just a stone’s throw away from the city’s concentrated poor, where educational inequalities lead to disparities in employment, income, housing, health care, safety, civil liberties and every other measure of well-being.
The needs in Miami-Dade County are plenty and can be overwhelming. “What can one person do,” you may ask? A lot if we all do something. TOGETHER … we can make a difference. Unfortunately, Miami ranks last in volunteerism among the 51 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service. If you are like me, I don’t intentionally mean to be uncaring and unloving but it happens. Our world is a large, impersonal busy institution of people rushing from one place to another. We drive to work on crowded streets and then seclude ourselves in cubicles, often plugged into music as we busy ourselves behind computers but not neglecting to surf the Internet for the latest sports scores and celebrity gossip. We exchange the spoken word for text messages and emails on our smartphones. There is no time for eye contact or the exchange of basic social pleasantries such as “good morning” and “hello.”
Noted sociologist Charles Derber recently wrote in The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life, an updated second edition of his book of the same title published more than 20 years earlier: “At that time, Americans were entering a period of self preoccupation and a self involvement so overwhelming that they were losing the time and empathy to relate to other people. These trends seem to only be intensifying today. The rise in a temporary and overextended work force, the demands of balancing of work and family, the emergence of a celebrity culture all serve to reinforce people’s focus on their own needs.”
Let’s resurrect the message of the 1975 classic “Wake Up Everybody” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes:
The world won’t get no better If we just let it be The world won’t get no better We gotta change it yeah, Just you and me.
Instead of complaining on Facebook and Twitter about inequality and injustice, let’s actually do something … TOGETHER. Understanding there are no quick fixes and no one size fits all, let’s unite and live out personal values to create an American counter culture that cares not only about the well being of individuals but the community as well.
Felecia Theune is a sociologist who studies the structural barriers that limit opportunity, equality and access to civil and social liberties.