Arctangential

Walking home from the bus the other afternoon, I passed one of the local homeless people in my neighborhood. She is particularly memorable because she has a collection of about a half dozen shopping carts, all filled with junk. Sometimes she lashes them into a fleet and other times she has them split up, scattered over a few blocks. She isn’t usually with them, although she’s often nearby, doing something intently with paper and pens and glue. In this case, she was sitting on the curb next to just one of her carts, half of its payload of newspapers spread around her in a semicircle on the sidewalk behind her. She had one of the papers open in the street in front of her and was singing; whether to it or from it, I can’t say for sure. She seemed to be having a lot of fun.

I thought to myself that it was a shame that her enormous energy, know-how and dedication to craft couldn’t be put to to use at a job someplace, but then I thought further, is it a shame? It’s possible that she is as happy as she could possibly be, and any attempt to make her work to deadline and work at the direction of someone else would result only in a reduction of that happiness. The only reason she would need a job, frankly, is for guarantors of health like money for food and medical coverage, and it seems to me like those are the kinds of things a wealthy government should provide to everyone living in its borders regardless of employment. Some people would call that welfare and would say that people ought to be able to pull their own weight, but that sounds to me like saying that a person ought not be allowed to live if they do not serve the purposes of others. The only reason that I am seen as more valuable and more accomplished than she, is that I am able and willing to do a particular thing which some other people want.

Some people judge the health of a nation by its unemployment rate. That is, they count the number of people like me, people who are useful to others and are put to that use. I think that the health of a nation should be measured by the number of people like the crazy shopping cart lady, that is, people who are happy.