I have taken Miami Dade College president Eduardo J. Padron's advice to heart: imagine a better Miami. If he is as sincere as he seems to be, Mr. Padron is very much interested in imagining a better "civil society" for Miami, and in taking certain unspecified steps to realize the age-old dream of social justice. He opines that our society will not survive if the egregious social injustice in Miami is not corrected. Such has indeed been the case throughout history. Few civilizations survived widespread injustice; but dissidents should not be too hopeful, for unjust civilizations took centuries to fall. Most people would rather endure dire circumstances than revolt and risk further denigration if not death.
Miami is the new model for the latinoamericanizacion of the United States of America - a process dubbed miamizacion by some Latin American experts. The Magic City may eventually duplicate the shocking contrast between the rich and poor of Mexico City, Rio, and other Latin American meccas: an under funded and dilapidated transportation system might carry servants from outlying shacks and tenements to the sparkling towers of the ownership society downtown and on the beach - a 74-story condominium tower is now slated for downtown Miami.
As Miami now stands, many people commute five hours a day to low-paying jobs downtown and on Miami Beach because they cannot afford the rents near their workplaces, let alone afford a condominium. Yet professional beggars, drug pushers, career thieves and mentally displaced persons of the future might continue the present trend and overrun Miami's affluent streets; they constitute the vulgar reflection of the legalized organized-crime operation of the political-economic overlords above: the gods of the cult of individualism who make men in their own image because men look up to them in vain. Or so one side of the rhetoric goes.
The dissolution corresponding to the cult of individualism has accelerated with the technological means - individuals seem to be subject to a death instinct that would atomize their world one way or another, preparing it for the Fire. Still, two centuries might pass before violent revolution occurs, before the apocalypse that many hopeless old men are dying to see - some say 144,000, or 12,000 from each tribe, will be saved to populate utopia.
Leaving traditional prophecy aside, much has been alleged about the growing gap between the rich and poor as the speculative real estate bubble inflates in Miami. Just for starters, we hear how favored developers, in cahoots with boodling city officials and other civic leaders of the most corrupt, impoverished, and mentally ill city in the richest nation on Earth, drink from underground streams of freshly laundered money as they perpetuate the impoverishment and neglect of Miami’s poor.
Of course we do not hate the rich, for the rich have a conscience. After all, most of the liberties we enjoy today were won for us, long before universal suffrage, by the guilty consciences of privileged people - thank you very much. And now the Miami Dade college president reports that fifty civic leaders recently gathered together for the first phase of the new imaginative project, Imagine Miami, wherefore Miami might have a better future than the traditional rubble imagined by the conservative desert prophets who have always detested urban money-grubbing and seed-mixing, and have longed for the return of the good old noble (arab) days.
But to imagine something better for our respective neighborhoods, I think we should first of all, examine the existing evil. We see much good in Miami, but wherever good exists some corresponding evil may be found. If we would progress from evils to goods, whosoever ignores evil is good for nothing.
We notice that many Miami neighborhoods, even prosperous neighborhoods, are "blighted." Blight is so widespread that it has been legally defined in statutes here and there, that it might be remedied by real estate developers whether the residents and owners of the blighted properties like it or not. The nosology of the disease has grown so absurd that the mayor of one town, after pushing for the condemnation and redevelopment of one neighborhood, was embarrassed to find out that her own home was blighted according to the definition. But "blight" per se does not have to be officially defined or even mentioned in order to run people off the land and populate it with the chosen people who stand to profit by casting shadows as they strive to fill the vault.
Besides, blight might not be such a bad thing for futurists who imagine better things for neighborhoods, for they must have some basis for creative discontent. At least it stimulates the imagination of real estate consortiums, whose members believe that real estate is the basis of all wealth and do the best to make it so. Blighted property gets run into the ground; tenants move away; new buildings are put up or old ones renovated for the "ownership society." The biggest profits are made in short order by a few people in critical periods of the cycle. Folks lose their "blighted" lifestyles: they are pushed out of the 'revitalized' neighborhood as it is 'gentrified' and "beautified" by the entrepreneurial crowd. Property values rise once the "riff raff" are gotten rid of; and then it is worth the provision of adequate security by private and public police forces.
Speaking of the blighted neighborhoods, I am daily confronted by dire poverty and its results on my very doorstep in South Miami Beach. I live in what many residents are beginning to call the "duty free zone", the "exclusive" and "chic Art Deco" area around Lincoln Road and Washington Avenue, where the police evidently do not feel it is their duty to prevent crime but only to respond to crime once it is committed and reported. They do drop by the restaurant for coffee and meals, but it is not their duty to walk around the corner and disturb the pimps and drug dealers who hold nocturnal office hours on the patio by our doorstep, to wake up the pitiful vagrants who sleep on the porches and patios, and take them to shelters or treatment centers. The side doors of my building are often propped open with beer cans so tricks can be turned, drugs used, take-out meals eaten, and naps taken. When the stairwells get crowded, the vagrants come into the halls and sleep. The elderly tenants tend to leave their doors unlocked; their property disappears, but the loss is attributed to the paranoid imagination of the senile. Residents have experienced some relief from all this lately, thanks to the voodoo incantations of the new cleaning lady.
The police blotter records numerous thefts and related assaults in the neighborhood around Lincoln and Washington. We can hardly blame professional thieves from flocking to Miami Beach, not given the laxity of the police and the fact that the pickings are so good. For instance, a woman reported she had over $8,000 in her purse when it was snatched; a man had nearly $5,000 in his money belt before the woman rubbed up against him and felt his crotch.
Many crimes are not reported, particularly crimes against those who have warrants out on them. For instance, 'James' is wanted on a minor charge. His wife was killed two years ago in a car accident, right after he was laid off his job as a security guard. Depressed, he took up the bottle and landed on South Beach during Spring Break, behind the "hip" and "coolest" hotel in Miami, the Delano Hotel, where he was mugged while sleeping it off. He awoke during the process; he resisted and was kicked, breaking a rib; and then he was shot; fortunately, the bullet just grazed him.
South Beach gets hardly any bad press, not unless there is a big rumble, killing, or a drug sweep of the nightclubs. A few white-shirted patrolmen have been spotted on foot or on bicycles on rare occasions; but the regular police officers do not get out of their cruisers or off their motorcycles and walk around from time to time. They claim their hands are tied by civil rights laws: that they must sit on their hands in their squad cars when it comes to employing simple preventative methods. I suppose their hands must be tied by the city's legislative neglect and the like, since Miami Beach residents report they see things going on that the police simply do not tolerate in the worst neighborhoods of Miami proper.
As for response time, I witnessed a fifteen-minute response to a call about an ongoing assault and battery at Kinkos near Alton and Lincoln Road, an altercation over who was next in line. Kinkos is a few blocks from the main South Beach police station. A guy was throwing things - I heard things thumping against the plate glass window as I walked by. He had just smashed an employee in the head with a plastic sign. He was wrestled to the floor, where one customer held him in a full-Nelson. I understand the irate man got the book thrown at him by the judge; his defense was that a woman had "disrespected" him, which is apparently justification for slapping women around in his country of origin.
Last Sunday, I could not help but overhear a South Pointe resident loudly complaining within earshot of motorcycle cops that it had taken all of a half hour for the cops to show up for a violent altercation across the street from the South Pointe Starbucks on Ocean Drive, although the new police substation is a five-minute walk from there. The cops paid him no mind at all and walked away, as they were having their coffee break at the time. Another violent altercation including a stabbing took place nearby a week later.
No doubt the police believe they are doing what they can do; no doubt they follow their orders. The authorities behind the orders do not want a police state on South Beach, for let's face the truth: South Beach is one of the most famous party places in the country, known for its celebrities, music, boozing, drugs, promiscuous gay and straight sex and the like. An occasional rape, some mayhem, a murder or two, and plenty of theft are the price one must pay for the revenue. Puritanical party-poopers are not appreciated. One must learn to "let things slide" on South Beach.
Mr. Padron pointed out in his editorial ('Imagine a better Miami,' The Herald - 3/14/05) that not only our wealth, "but, yes, our poverty places us at the cutting edge of metropolitan development." During a discussion of a proposed amendment to the panhandling ordinance at a March 16 meeting of Miami Beach city commissioners, ACLU attorney Benjamin Waxman argued that beggars are part of the uniqueness of Miami Beach that draws tourists - Commissioner Luis Garcia responded with, "You think people come to Miami Beach to see panhandlers? I know you are crazy." ('Nicked and Dimed,' SunPost - 3/24/05)
Just yesterday I dropped into a fast-food joint on Washington Avenue for a sandwich and struck up a conversation with the young lady tending the counter. She is a pretty girl at eighteen years - I must have suddenly aged, because girls that age look like they just got out of their baby cribs. She said she had recently immigrated to South Beach from Texas, and that her grandmother wants her to come home. I casually remarked that Texas is "dirt poor." She agreed, but said she had never seen anything like the poverty in Miami, and that Texas was much better. She had believed Miami Beach would be a nice place before she came here, but in fact she discovered the streets are filled with creepy people. Her job was "scary", she said. The insane derelicts living on the streets come in at night and frighten her with their bizarre behavior. She thought she was going to be assaulted and robbed by a guy who came in last night, she recounted, so she called the owner to come down. I advised her to listen to her grandmother. I said I knew she would probably not do so - I told her how I had left home at an early age and never went home because I didn't know better at the time.
Then I walked over to Alton Road to get some soymilk on sale at the Wild Oats store. A man who was sitting on the sidewalk, well known by residents and police officers for his angry outbursts and profanity, got up and threw a string of expletives and his can of soda at me. He apparently thinks the world is a Broadway stage, for in between curses he expressed his resentment of what he said is my leading role, and for "upstaging" him. Well, I thought, they said I was a natural born actor, so maybe I should have stuck with it - but I did not like to recite other writer's lines.
A few hours later, I dropped in to chat with the owner of a Washington Avenue store. He was closing its doors, he said, not because of the high rent or any lack of traffic - business was good - but because of "the drunks, drug people, and crazy people." He just could not stand the lifestyle. As for the police, he said, "they do nothing."
A neighbor of mine, a gun-loving libertarian who loved Beirut in chaos when he lived there around the time of the big bombing, told me this morning that the deplorable social conditions in my neighborhood are not the consequence of poverty but are the price of a free country, a country that is not free enough, in his opinion.
"What you and others around here complain about is the reason for your liberty," he said. "The police are doing the right thing: they should keep their noses out of people's business unless they are called. Every civilization is going to have its corrupt element. Society needs corruption in order to flourish. Every wholesome society is going to have insane people, every village its village idiot. Many things called nice and normal, good and sane, are evil and abnormal really. Nothing is perfect, and that's what's great about it, the opportunity."
"Maybe so, but I imagine something better for Miami. I think poverty has a lot to do with the social problems on South Beach."
"Hey, the drunks, the addicts, the thieves, the bums...."
I interjected: "The policewoman I talked to called them bums several times, then she said we should not call them bums. After all, they are human beings. Of course some humans are bums - maybe there is a bum at the bottom of every human being...."
"The human bums," he went on, "want to bum money. The drunks want to get drunk. The addicts want to be addicted to drugs. The homeless want to be homeless. Leave them be and get yourself a gun for self-protection if you are worried about thieves."
"Not everybody wants to be like that. I think we should do like the college president says, imagine a better Miami, take certain steps to realize our dreams," I insisted.
"If Miami isn't good enough for you as it is, you'd be better off leaving town than imagining things and fighting city hall and the police department to get them. Do you think the president of the college or the mayor of Miami Beach or the police chief or the developers really give a damn about you and what you imagine? The imaginary city is just talk. The real city is for los cinquenta padrones, senor, not for you. Why don't you go back to Hawaii to live - not in Honolulu but on that other island, the one hit by the hurricane, on Kowy.”
"Kauai," I corrected him. "I would, but Hawaii is so remote, and paradise can be hell."
"There you go. Forget about the social justice thing if you want to get along around here, my friend. Get with it. Get what you can. Get rich. Anything goes if you can get away with it. Grab what you can and run. Stop whining about what you can’t change. Move out of that dump and into a nice condo."
