Finding Street Sense in a Walt Whitman poem

I took over as editor of Street Sense, a newspaper that covers poverty and homelessness in the Washington, D.C., area and is sold by homeless vendors for income, three weeks ago. My first editor's column appeared in the July 15 issue and is reproduced below.

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Celebrating Multitudes

The streets were deserted outside Union Station when I pulled up in a cab at 3 a.m. on a Thursday. Inside, an Amtrak waiting lounge was crowded with travelers slumped in place or lying across several seats in unapologetic sleep. My train to New York for a journalism conference didn’t leave for another hour, but there were no empty seats here. I rolled my little bag to the next lounge, my eyelids itching from too little sleep in a long week of deadlines.

Less than 40 feet away, another lounge looked emptier and somehow different. There were far fewer travelers but they were all in deep, stretched-out slumber. They had surprisingly little luggage, if you could call their few plastic bags luggage. Where were these people going with their beat-up looking CVS bags?

I hesitated. An unwashed smell drifted by.

They weren’t catching a train. They were homeless. They were catching up on their sleep under these fluorescent lights, using their hands or a balled-up shirt for a pillow.

Less than a month ago, I would probably have sat somewhere else. This Thursday, two weeks after I took over as editor of Street Sense, I mentally shrugged and settled into a stretch of empty seats, taking care to avoid the source of the smell.

It made me think of “Gotta Go,” the pilot episode of Street Sense TV, a 13-part series put together by a homeless crew and due to air on District cable this fall. “Gotta Go” illustrates a devastatingly simple problem: where do you go to the bathroom if you’re homeless? And how do you avoid smelling bad if you don’t have a regular place to wash and change your clothes?

Less than a month ago, I would not have looked as deeply at the people stretched out around me and wondered about their daily rituals of survival. I’ve never been homeless. But since joining Street Sense, I’ve been doing some serious learning.

Some of the learning has been professional, like taking an intensive weekend class in New York City to learn our page-layout program, or attending workshops on affordable housing at a homelessness conference on Capitol Hill.

But much of the learning has been based on personal interactions with the vendors and volunteers who frequent our little office in the Church of the Epiphany every day.

So far, I’ve found Street Sense to be a unique little animal, more challenging and multitudinous than any place I’ve worked in my 12 years in journalism. I’ve learned creative ways to survive when our computer network crashes and we have no technical help available in the face of a looming printer deadline. I’ve re-learned that powerful storytelling and beautifully fragile poetry can come from unexpected sources. I’ve understood that despite their best intentions, sometimes people will break promises and let each other down. But I’ve also seen them try to rise again.

I think of Walt Whitman when I think of Street Sense:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you…

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Things that go fatwa in the knight

(Caricature by Riber Hansson)

In search of more information on Salman Rushdie's knighthood and the angry sputtering from Iran and Pakistan, I made a rather interesting discovery.

Did you know Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II records Royal podcasts? They are infrequent but available. Her last was on Commonwealth Day, which falls on March 12.

But back to important things. Every February, on the fatwa's anniversary, Iran announces that the 1989 death threat to Rushdie is still valid. Click here to see a video of Rushdie reading from "The Satanic Verses."

This June 16, the British government announced it was bestowing knighthood on Rushdie.

The literary world proclaimed its delight at the news. Iran and Pakistan summoned their British envoys to express their displeasure.

A Times story Tuesday:

"Eighteen years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill him, a government minister in Pakistan said yesterday that Rushdie’s recent knighthood justified suicide bombing.

The question of blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s 1988 tale of a prophet misled by the devil, remains a deeply sensitive issue in much of the Muslim world and the author’s inclusion in the Queen’s Birthday Honours last week has inflamed anti-British sentiment.

Gerald Butt, editor of the authoritative Middle East Economic Survey, told The Times: 'It will be interpreted as an action calculated to goad Muslims at a time when the atmosphere is already very tense and Britain’s standing in the region is very low because of its involvement in Iraq and its lack of action in tackling the Palestine issue.'"

At least one Irani group has raised the bounty on Rushdie's head to $150,000.

And the Queen's effigy was burned in Multan, Pakistan.

Click here to download the full list of people honored by the Queen on her birthday. Rushdie's name appears under "Knighthoods" on page 2 of the 95-page document: "Ahmed Salman Rushdie. Author. For services to Literature."

And since we were all wondering, here is the Royal description of the significance of knighthood:

"A knighthood (or a damehood, its female equivalent) is one of the highest honours an individual in the United Kingdom can achieve.

While in past centuries knighthood used to be awarded solely for military merit, today it recognises significant contributions to national life.

Recipients today range from actors to scientists, and from school head teachers to industrialists.

A knighthood cannot be bought and it carries no military obligations to the Sovereign."

And on the same page, this illuminating sidebar, "Did You Know?":

"In ceremony of knighting, the knight-elect kneels on a knighting-stool in front of The Queen, who then lays the sword blade on the knight's right and then left shoulder....Contrary to popular belief, the words 'Arise, Sir ...' are not used."

Note to angry Muslim extremists: You wanted to punish Rushdie in 1989 and made him world-famous instead. Now the queen will honor his fame by taking a sword to his head. Are you happy now?

The senator from Illinois vs. the senator from Punjab

(Photo credit: Associated Press/Ron Edmonds)

Barack Obama's presidential campaign is facing an onslaught of criticism from the Indian-American community after it released a memo Friday tying Hillary Clinton's stance on outsourcing to her and her husband's financial dealings with businesses in India. The memo, released on the condition that it not be attributed to the Obama campaign, called the former First Lady "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)."

Obama said Monday the memo was a "dumb mistake." He told Rediff.com, a prominent Indian news site, in an interview published today that he was "furious" when he heard about the memo. "Obama acknowledged he had no idea about the document that was being circulated by some members of his campaign staff till the controversy erupted, when the Indian-American community was in uproar and his Indian-American supporters contacted his campaign expressing their concern," Rediff.com reported.

"We are taking corrective action to make sure that people understand how this could be potentially hurtful," Obama told Rediff.com.

Apart from this rebuke from a prominent political action committee, reactions from Indian news sites included headlines like this one, "Obama attacks Indian community."

Obama's trying to make amends, but the three days that passed between the memo's initial release and his public response have probably left some lasting damage.

The group South Asians for Obama (SAFO) is sure ticked off.

Scathing reader comments dominated its message board Monday.

"Pretty stupid thing for Obama's campaign to do. I mean, does this campaign realize that the Indian American community in this country is very financially viable and politically active? I bet they just lot a lot of their votes," read one.

"What really bothers me is that a (D-Israel), (R-Vatican) or (D-Mexico) would have triggered an immediate apology. We deserve the same connsideration (sic)," said another.

"I'm sorry, but my allegiance will probably have to switch. I mean, '(D-Punjab)'? That is not just offensive, it's immature. With a wife who works in politics, I know that a message like that comes from the top down. And all an apology will mean is 'we're sorry this got out.' Obama lost a voter and a donor in me." This by someone signed "Vijay."

Read the full Obama campaign memo here.

Here's the NYT:

"Shortly after the Clinton campaign released the financial information, the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, circulated to news organizations — on what it demanded be a not-for-attribution-basis — a scathing analysis. It called Mrs. Clinton “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)” in its headline. The document referred to the investment in India and Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising efforts among Indian-Americans. The analysis also highlighted the acceptance by Mr. Clinton of $300,000 in speech fees from Cisco, a company the Obama campaign said has moved American jobs to India.

A copy of the document was obtained by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, which provided it to The New York Times. The Clinton campaign has long been frustrated by the effort by Mr. Obama to present his campaign as above the kind of attack politics that Mr. Obama and his aides say has led to widespread disillusionment with politics by many Americans.

Asked about the document, Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, said: 'We did give reporters a series of comments she made on the record and other things that are publicly available to anyone who has access to the Internet. I don’t see why anyone would take umbrage with that.'

Asked why the Obama campaign had initially insisted that it not be connected to the document, Mr. Burton replied, 'I’m going to leave my comment at that.'"

Here's more from Rediff.com's "exclusive interview" with Obama Monday:

"Asked what kind of corrective measures he intended to put in place, the Illinois Senator asserted, 'The main thing is just to make certain that anything that goes out under my name or goes out under our campaign's name -- whether it's for attribution or otherwise -- is screened by all senior staff to make sure that we don't make mistakes like this in the first place.'

'The other thing I am obviously doing is reaching out to all my supporters in the Indian-American community to assure them this isn't reflective of my views,' he said.

Obama said he hoped that 'people recognise that this is just an anomalous situation as opposed to any more serious issue in terms of my grasp and understanding of the importance of the Indian-American community and the relationship between the United States and India.'

In a message to the mushrooming South Asians for Obama chapters across the US, the majority of whom are young second-generation Indian Americans, Obama said, 'I want them to know how much I appreciate their support, I want them to know how much their involvement means to our campaign.'"

Daily Kos doesn't think Obama's snafu will get mass attention but that it will stick with Indian-Americans.

"They may be small, but they are not tiny, numbering almost 1% of the population. They are also the best educated and wealthiest group of any national origin in the U.S. They thus have a fair amount of money to give to politics, if they wish, and I assume that this kind of comment would spread far and fast among the politically influential people in this community."

Obama's Web site has no whiff of the controversy, so Kos is probably right about this staying confined to a select community. It's hardly a "macaca moment," as some bloggers suggest.

Meanwhile, I can't seem to find a story mentioning as much as a peep out of Hillary Clinton's campaign in response. Not that her campaign needs to do anything except sit back and watch.

More on the globalization of Father's Day

Just received this from Columbia University's Sree Sreenivasan in an emailed update from SAJAForum, a daily news blog by the South Asian Journalists Association:

"It's Father's Day in the U.S., but I am in India right now, where it's not as big a deal. In fact, I didn't even realize it's celebrated at all. But, according to one site (which needs an editor), Father's Day is 'celebrated by millions of people in India.'"

Here's the full description of Father's Day in India from Sree's referenced site:

"The concept of celebrating Father's Day is very new in India. The idea of celebrating Fathers Day has been imported from western countries mainly US, perhaps less than a decade ago. However, it is remarkable to note that the idea of observing a day in honor of fathers has been appreciated by Indians to a large extent. Today, millions of people in India observe Father's Day on the third Sunday of June by expressing gratitude for their father or men who are like father. Father's Day celebration in India takes place in the same way as in UK or US though in a limited way. Awareness about Fathers Day festival is much greater in metropolitan cities and bigger towns due to the greater exposure of people to the western cultures in such places. But thanks to the rigorous advertising campaign launched by card companies and gift sellers the idea of celebrating Father's Day is fast catching on with people in smaller towns and cities of India. Just as in UK and US people in India too, celebrate Father's Day by expressing gratitude and love for Papa. Children gift cards, flowers and other gifts of love to their dad to show their affection. Dining in restaurants or going out for picnic or movie is another common way of celebrating Fathers Day in India. Several schools and cultural societies in India organize cultural programs on Father's Day. The idea behind such programmes is to inspire children to pay due respect to their dad and take care of them. Fathers are also encouraged to spend quality time with their children and instill in them noble values and manners."

The Google of job sites

Forgive my gushing, but I just came across Indeed.com and it is the coolest and simplest job search site. Ever. It is the Costco of job sites, everything from your tomatoes to your tires under one roof. It is the Google of job sites. It is the stop-checking-a-dozen-job-sites-a-day-dear-put-your-feet-up-and have-some-tea of job sites.

It looks like a Google search page in its simplicity. Plug in a job title and a location, and Indeed will search "all the job listings from major job boards, newspapers, associations and company career pages." Read more about it here.

But it gets better. Plug in a job title and a location and hit "salary" and Indeed.com will instantly search Salary.com and other sites to give you the going pay rates. It's great when you just want to get a quick idea and not have to fuss about whether you qualify as a level I or II or III in your field.

And you can search the job listings archive over the last two years to get a graphical representation of recent trends in job listings. I wanted to see how often the word "blog" appeared in job listings. See the graph above.

There were hardly any job listings with the word "blog" in February 2005 (at least among the sites that Indeed.com was harnessing at the time). Two years later, the graph looks like something out of "An Inconvenient Truth."

Try plugging other terms in the trends section. What do you find? Isn't this cool??

I'm still gushing, aren't I? I won't apologize. I'm going to put my feet up and have some tea.

The globalization of Mother's and Father's Day

I bought Father's Day cards for the first time in my life today. It wasn't a holiday we paid particular attention to when I was growing up. But now commercial Western holidays have made their way through satellite TV all the way to Pakistan to my parents' living room.

Last year in May, I called my mom in Karachi for one of our regular chats. Then suddenly...

"You never sent me a Mother's Day card," she said mildly.

"What?"

"None of my children called or sent me a Mother's Day card," she said again, her voice faintly chagrined.

"But Ma," I protested, my thoughts knocked askew. "We've never celebrated Mother's Day. I didn't even think you knew when Mother's Day was."

And besides, we've always made fun of holidays like Mother's Day, Ma!, I thought as my mind gathered into a little ball of defensiveness. We always said it was something people did once a year because they never called their mothers the rest of the time. We always said that for us, every day was Mother's Day!

I must have sputtered some of this aloud, because my mother tried to dismiss the issue.

"It's okay, Koki," she said. "It doesn't matter."

So this year, without mentioning it in our weekly phone calls, I sent her a card. It was a simple, square card with a flower on the cover that simply told her we loved her.

Now it's Father's Day and I'm not taking any chances. That's how I found myself in the greeting card aisle of a Giant supermarket, trying to find not one but two cards for the dads my husband and I share.

I spent a good 15 minutes picking up one card and then the next and the next with a growing sense of dismay. The realization dawned that I was seeing a real pattern among all the rejected cards. Yes, there it was again.

Bathroom humor.

I didn't get it. What was it about Father's Day that caused a proliferation of fart jokes?

And with the growing popularity of Father's and Mother's Day gift-giving, is this irreverence in danger of becoming a global trend?

A quick Google search for "Father's Day International" took me to a Relief International forum where kids from Bangladesh, Tajikistan and Wisconsin posted their thoughts on the holiday last year.

"Honestly I haven’t heard about Father’s Day before, and give present to my Father only on February 23 (It is Armies Day) but this month we have learned about Father’s Day and tried to create some hand-made presents," wrote Suhrob Sulaymonov of Tajikistan.

My favorite post was by a student in Bangladesh, who didn't make presents or cards but a simple declaration of devotion. Written June 22, 2006, it was titled, "Best papa in the world."

"My papa is a teacher. He is not only a papa but also a philosopher, guide and friend to me. He loves me not only top of the world but also best in the world. He is a modern papa. He knows all wants of mine and fill that want what is really good for me. and avoid that which is bad for me and also for my future. My father take me to the different park and shopping mall for shopping and fun. I love and respect him a lot. He is the richest gift in my life. I will never hert my father & will try to make his all dreams that he draw and imagine about me.

Md. Adib Rahman Nabil
Sirajuddin Sarker Vidyaniketan (Tonig-1)
Tongi Bazar, Gazipur"

If importing Father's Day to the rest of the world means encouraging more kids to express themselves like that, I guess it's not such a bad thing. Maybe we can learn a thing or two about Father's Day from the reactions of those who've just been introduced to it.

There'd be a whole lot less bathroom humor in the greeting card aisle, for sure.

Taking a leaf out of Facebook

It's spawned a thousand stories about old people gatecrashing into a world of young people ever since it opened its registration and doubled its users to 24 million. Fifty-something Emily Yoffe of Slate.com did this piece back on March 8 about not finding any friends her own age on Facebook.

"Scrolling around the photos of all these creamy young people, I felt as if I should be wearing an ankle bracelet that sent signals to my parole officer. I also found all my high-school- and college-age nieces and nephews, but I knew they'd be as thrilled to receive my friend request as they would to have me show up at one of their mixers (do they still have mixers?)," Yoffe wrote.

Then she did this follow-up gloat a week later when a gazillion people friended her out of pity.

"Plowing through the 775 requests made fresh the banal observation that young people are good-looking. (This was underlined when my husband would come into my office and, standing over my shoulder, say, "Click on her!") Their freshness made me want to protect them. I felt like Holden Caulfield when he imagined children playing in a field of rye: 'What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.' I wanted to catch these students and say, 'Don't let a drunk friend drive you home! Be careful who you marry! Take the obscenities off your Facebook profile!'," Yoffe wrote.

Three months later, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote a pale imitation of Emily Yoffe's column. He didn't seem to share her enthusiasm for online networks.

"I'm still puzzled by this mysterious process in which some people invite you to become friends (meaning you can see their home pages, photos and compilation of friends) while others blow you off. Some 20-somethings "friended" me out of the blue but never sent me any messages or replied to mine. It almost seems like the point is to collect a long list of names rather than establish relationships outside your immediate circle," Kurtz wrote, scratching his head.

Clearly, he was missing the point. Yoffe's obvious enjoyment of Facebook's young people won over many more friends than Kurtz's grumpy I'm-too-old-for-this-anyway act -- she had 1055 friends as of 9.17 pm on June 13, while Kurtz...had 217.

Not that Facebook is a popularity contest. My point is only this. If you are older than your early twenties, the significance of Facebook to your life is directly proportional to two things: one, the openness with which you approach the obvious age gap between you and other Facebookers, and two, the enthusiasm with which you invite people you already know to join you online.

This was so exquisitely illustrated by a June 7 New York Times article that I promptly posted the entire story as a note on my Facebook profile with a single "Ahem."

Michelle Slatalla's piece -- 'omg my mom joined facebook!!' -- perfectly captured the self-doubt and sheepish pleasure of all Facebook members older than 21. It stayed on the most-emailed list of NYT articles for days past its publication.

Slatalla joined Facebook in part to get back at a snarky teenage daughter. She added her daughter's friends to her list and then invited her own to join Facebook. She poked someone here, wrote on a wall there, and started having fun.

Then she called an assistant professor of cultural anthropology to ask what it all meant. He told her to grow up.

"But although he didn’t go so far as to say he disapproved of my parenting skills, Professor Wesch reminded me that what Facebook’s younger users really are doing is exploring their identities, which they may not want to parade in front of their parents.

'Can’t I explore my identity, too?' I asked. 'Why does everything fun have to be for them?'

He pointed out that there are a number of other social networks — sober, grown-up places like Linkedin.com (for making business contacts) and Care2.com (for social activists) and Webbiographies.com (for amateur genealogists) — where I could cavort without offending my daughter.

'There is a really good social network for older people, too,' Professor Wesch said. 'It caters to the older generation with an automatic feed of news that relates to older generations and a number of features tailored to the way people in that generation would interact.'

'What’s it called? I asked.

'I can’t remember the name of it,' he said.

'Exactly,' I said. 'I’m staying where it’s fun.'"

As for me, I joined Facebook a few weeks ago at the invitation of a former coworker in Dubai. Upon my arrival into this brave new world, I found five other invitations already waiting for me from other friends, like spirits in a fourth dimension which I hadn't seen until now, and to which I didn't know I belonged.

Now nearly all my Facebook friends represent friendships plucked and gathered across the continents and the years.

Before this, I belonged to a Google-owned networking site called Orkut, a bug-ridden clunker that could never match Facebook's streamlined functionality. And its outreach seemed limited to users of international origin: while I found lots of my Pakistani friends on there, I never spotted any Americans.

With Facebook, I've found lost-long high school classmates from California and first cousins from Karachi. I've found acquaintances in Boston I wanted to get to know better and old friends in London with whom I'd lost touch.

It's helped me pull together strands of all the different social webs in my life and weave them safely into a neat little profile page. It's going to be hard to lose touch now.

Unlike Kurtz or even Yoffe, I don't collect names of people I don't know but cherish connecting to the ones I already do.

Thankfully, I don't, like Slatalla, have a 16-year-old who tells me "everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks."

But I was a middle school teacher once, and Facebook is rife with my former students. Even among 24 million profiles, theirs pop up in mutual Pakistani circles.

A bit queasy about it at first, I now enjoy looking at my students' profiles and marvelling at their development into poised young adults. I don't initiate friend invitations but accept theirs if they come my way. It's my way of making peace with the generation gap in Facebook.

And the kids don't seem to mind. I got a cheerful note scrawled on my wall soon after I joined.

"Oh wow, HELLO! =) Been so long. How've you been miss?!"