SIGNS OF MISERY ALL AROUND FOR THE WORLD TO SEE

By Juan Montoya
Where do you find the signs of misery as you walk though the streets of Brownsville?
Is it in the dry statistics of the MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) readily available through the Internet or at your local library?
Or is it in the long lines at the Texas Human Services Department building where women with their children sit from the early morning hours and wait patiently to apply or renew for assistance?

Maybe it's in the number of homeless people who sit on park benches. Or perhaps it's manifest in the homeless sleeping in downtown store doorways until the morning comes and they have to vacate the premises and hike to the Good Neighbor Settlement Home to get a meal and a shower.

Or does misery reveal itself in the number of families scavenging through fetid alley dumpsters behind second-hand stores looking for items they can resell or even wear themselves?

Perhaps it's the scores of young men carrying a plastic five-gallon paint cans asking if they can wash your car while you do your business in downtown stores or offices? Or does it manifest itself in the hungry and vacant eyes of crackheads panhandling the patrons at local dives to get the $2 or $3 bucks they need to buy the rock?

Or it it in the furtive, hopeful smile that the girls and women who hang around the hourly-rate hotel give you as they ask you if you want a "date?"

Or maybe it's in the eyes of job seekers walking on a beaten path on the shoulder of the road – most places there are no sidewalks – because they don't have a car and they don't have the bus fare to ride public transportation.

Yet, if he had a $350 bicycle bicycle and a snazzy Under Armor outfit, he would have a state-of-the-art bike-and-hike trial bought and paid for by our chisquiada city commission.

With all these distractions, it stands to reason that most of the time we are blind to the misery around us and have grown so inured to the poverty and squalor that it goes right over our head.

Witness, for example, the long lines at the local plasma donation centers. Many are local residents, but many of the "donors" at the downtown centers are from Matamoros who queued patiently from dawn to be able to donate their blood and walk out to the local grocery store afterward and buy the 10 pounds of pollo leg quarters ($3.90)  and 15 pounds of potatoes ($2.95) to feed the household for a week.

If you look closely, you can tell who has been to the centers by the telltale wrap around their left elbow where the needle was inserted to draw their blood.
The plasma companies report that the border has been a gold mine for their "service." And they're eyeing setting up shop in Mexican cities to tap onto that vein at the source.

Plasma is not cheap at a hospital, if it has ever been your misfortune to have to pay for it. The money they pay these "donors" is nothing compared to what they charge patients. But to the poor and destitute whose blood has been checked and deemed marketable, it's money in their pocket they wouldn't have any other way.

It's pollo con calabaza or pollo with potatoes. It's money for a "new" shirt or trousers at Ayner Second-Hand store. Maybe there might be something left over for a tarrito of draft beer over at La Carta before you take the mandado home.

If that isn't a measure of misery, then perhaps we have grown so jaded that only until you're there yourself, you won't recognize it.