God help me, but I am glad my parents
are not here to see this. Mountain View, California. There are
people living in their cars on the
streets now. Never, never in my life have I seen such a thing here.
I was born in Palo Alto and raised in
Mountain View. This is the home of Facebook
and Google. This is the home of capitalism. This is my home.
Every family has it's myth, or it's
truth. My parent's story sounds somewhat like a truth of mythic
proportions. My mother was the first
woman to graduate as an electrical engineer from New Mexico
State University. My father was a mathematician and engineer. They met while working on missile
telemetry at White Sands Proving
Grounds in the post Manhattan Project cold war era. In 1955 they
left to Palo Alto, California in an
exodus of engineers and scientists for the peace movement of the
San Francisco Bay Area. Many landed as
professors at Berkeley, or to Palo Alto as teachers and
engineers. Many joined the Unitarian church, the
epicenter of political activism.
“We no longer wanted to work on
weapons of mass destruction,” my mother said.
So I grew up learning to program
computers with punch cards. I grew up in an economy that was
nothing but upwardly mobile. I grew up
understanding that as my parents were of the Great
Depression, it was a given in this
life: Work hard, things get better.
It was one of those endless
Saturday afternoons, the type where all options are yours when you're
ten. Coloring, reading, bike riding,
playing my little guitar... the world was wide open for a child in
the early 70's. An old truck pulled up in
front of our manicured lawn. A man, he was Mexican, and a
boy about my age walked up to our front
door and I ran to answer. My father joined me and spoke to
this man while his son and I looked at each
other curiously. He probably wondered about my life as
much as I wondered about his.
The boy's dad said that he and his son
would wash all the windows on our house for twenty
five dollars, and my father said yes.
They did the work and my father offered them a few more jobs.
One day my mom told me that the man who
came to our door that day now had a full time job as
the handyman at a motel our neighbor across
the street owned. I asked my dad about that one day. He
told me how impressed he was. He told me of
the important and valuable lesson this father, who
barely spoke English was imparting on his son.
That it is ok to knock on someone's door. There is no
shame in asking for work. This boy had a
good father who was teaching him important values in this
world.
So I wonder when I look at the
level of homelessness where I come from, Silicon Valley. I wonder
how my father's values translate now.
How can any society continue when those whose hard work
doing the most basic things we all need,
childcare, cleaning, making food, washing windows... are
left to be homeless?
My father felt a deep commitment to
his fellow man. My father grew up in poverty, but he worked
hard and Things Got Better. In all
truth, my father could never say no to those who knocked on our
door for help.
So I wonder what he would do now.
There are so many to help. On the streets of Mountain View,
people have no place to live.
Right up until the crash of 2007/2008,
my father's life got better. That's when two thirds of everything
he worked for in this world vanished.
And it killed him. He died April 3rd, 2009.
God help me but I am thankful he is not
here to see what is happening in the town he made our home.
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