By Gregor Peter Schmitz and Gabor Steingart
In New York City, soup kitchens must make do with sharply reduced budgets, even though demand for their services has quadrupled. According to the city government, free meals were provided to 1.3 million people in 2007. From October to November 2008, the number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line suddenly jumped to 3 million.
More recently, city soup kitchens have been literally overrun by their clientele. The Church of the Holy Apostles in Manhattan currently distributes 1,250 meals a day, but even that is not enough, says Joel Berg, director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. "Many people leave without having received a meal."
Hunger is rarely a solitary affliction. Many of those waiting in line at soup kitchens no longer have permanent homes. Thousands of the homeless, including many families that could no longer pay their rent, have moved into inexpensive motels. These are people who were once part of America's middle class.
The Costa Mesa Motor Inn is in Orange County, an upscale area not far from Los Angeles, familiar to many TV viewers as the setting of "The O.C.," a series about the glamorous love lives of spoiled teenagers. The motel is next to an exceedingly green golf course, and a new shopping center across the street offers lattes for adults and play zones for children.
But there is nothing glamorous about the Costa Mesa Motor Inn, where strict rules are posted at the entrance: no alcohol, no panhandling. A police car is parked in front of the motel. Toy cars lined up on a windowsill in room 1108 serve as a reminder of better days.
"We were able to take the toy cars with us, but I had to throw most of the toys into the dumpster," says Sergio Gallardo. He rents a room at the motel, which is barely 100 square feet (10 square meters) in size and has a small kitchenette, for $870 (€670) a month. His children -- Raymon, 13, Sergio, 12, Alina, 8, Jacob, 5 and Lovely, 3 -- peer out of the dimly lit room.
The Gallardos, who used to live in a large, three-bedroom apartment, have been staying at the motel since November. Sergio, 33, a powerful-looking man wearing an XXL T-shirt, once earned a good living as a construction worker, while his wife raised the children. But now he has lost his job, his wife and his car. The family's German shepherd dog had to be taken to an animal shelter, because dogs are not permitted in the motel.
The only benefit of the family's new quarters is that there are many playmates for the children. A local charity estimates that more than 1,000 families are living in motels in Orange County. The face of the crisis is cheerful here at the Costa Mesa Motor Inn's playground, where children giggle and shriek as if they were at Disneyland.
As dire as their current situation is, the Gallardos are luckier than some of those in the Californian capital of Sacramento. There, not far from a railroad embankment, a tent city was, until recently, home to the poorest of the poor. The tent city had been around for several years but was in the past populated mainly by dropouts and drug addicts. But in recent months they were joined by the casualties of the economic crisis. Similar tent cities are growing all across the United States, from Seattle to Florida.
Compassion is good for TV ratings, as talk show host Oprah Winfrey demonstrated recently when she drew her viewers' attention to the Sacramento tent city. Oprah's publicity was embarrassing for Sacramento and its mayor, Kevin Johnson, and the tent city was cleared by the city last week. Johnson said that Sacramento would spend some $1 million on finding alternative shelter for those in the camp and providing more permanent housing.
The television images from Oprah's report were reminiscent of pictures in a history book. Like some bitter reminder of the past, pictures of adults with empty eyes and neglected children looked like a caricature of the American dream. Criminologist James Alan Fox, who has long warned of a rise in crisis-related crime, says that more and more Americans are struggling today. "The American dream to them is a nightmare, and the land of opportunity is but a cruel joke," Fox recently told the Washington Post.
Recent statistics confirm his predictions, as America begins to turn into a brutal place once again. April has already gone down as one of the bloodier months in American criminal history. A week before Easter, a 22-year-old man killed three police officers in Pittsburgh. On the same day, a 34-year-old man in Washington State shot his five children before turning his gun on himself. A day earlier, a man killed 13 people at an immigrant resource center and then took his own life. During the same month, a man from Priceville, Alabama shot his wife, his sister, her 11-year-old son, his own 16-year-old daughter and, finally, himself.
"This is the American way," New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes cynically. He points out that Americans have killed about 120,000 of their fellow Americans since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed to date in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More and more experts attribute the rise in crime in recent months to the dire state of the economy. "I've never seen such a large number (of killings) over such a short period of time involving so many victims," Jack Levin, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, told the Washington Post.
Once again, a generation of children are growing up in America whose daily lives are marked by violence and hopelessness. Education often suffers among the new underclass. Children who are homeless or live in motels are less likely to do their homework or even go to school.
Rhonda Haramis is in charge of the student outreach program at the Mary Bethune Transitional Center in Long Beach, California. On one day, she received calls from 18 parents, many of them saying that they were about to be evicted and could no longer guarantee that their children could attend school or that they could help them with their homework. Haramis and her fellow teachers don't know what to tell the parents. In an interview with a local newspaper, they likened the impact of the crisis on them to the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.
The social crisis is especially hard on those who were already struggling before, such as illegal immigrants working as day laborers. A group of them congregates every morning in the large parking lot of a Home Depot home improvement store in Los Angeles, directly on the city's world-famous Sunset Boulevard.
These day laborers no longer have any illusions. By 11 a.m., hundreds of men are still sitting on the small stone walls surrounding the parking lot, and whenever a car pulls up, a throng of men surround the vehicle, hoping for work. They rattle off the few bits of English they have picked up: "painting," "cleaning," "do everything," "cheap." Hardly any of the men is successful.
The crisis can disrupt everything, including Americans' faith in the beneficial actions of their own government. The Obama administration has already pumped billions into the banking system, and additional billions have been earmarked for road and bridge construction. Nevertheless, the social situation has steadily deteriorated.
The euphoria over the country's first black president, a man who won the election with catchwords like "change" and "hope," has ebbed away considerably. Obama's appealing words still sound appealing, but his listeners have recently starting paying more attention to what he does than to what he says.
When the president discusses the economic situation nowadays, the euphoria has given way to disenchantment in many places. When Obama stepped up to the microphone at Washington's Georgetown University last week, he warned his audience that his speech would be "prose and not poetry." But those words seemed superfluous, since these days no one would think of calling out: "Yes, we can!"
Most of all, a pensive Obama asked his audience for patience. He noted that although there are initial rays of hope that the situation could be improving, "we cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock." But this, he said, could not be done in a short period of time.
He continues to point his finger at his predecessor, the unpopular George W. Bush, to remind people how it all began. We have inherited a budget disaster, a real mess, he has said time and time again. But his words are no longer capable of igniting passions, because Bush is now history.
The former president now spends his days doing things like throwing out the first pitch at baseball games, as he did recently in Texas. On those occasions, he likes to smile for the cameras.
But whenever he is asked to comment on Obama's policies and his handling of the crisis, he tactfully declines to answer the question. "He deserves my silence," says Bush. The crisis has become Obama's crisis.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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