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In This Issue

• Idiotarod: Mushing Fun in NYC
• Desensitization: It Does a Body Good
• Shit Blowing Up is So Patriotic
• Letters to the Feditrix: Hot Pre-Teen Sex!
• Point: There's No State Like a Prostrate, Girls
• CounterPoint: Assloads of Bad Stuff
• I Could be the Spectator's Sex Columnist
• Hardcore CosmoGirls Have Some Things to Learn
• Point: Shocking Apathy for Homeless
• CounterPoint: Solution for Homeless is Lock and Load
• Burbery Scarves, Labia Elephantitis Linked
• Elimidate Plays Cupid, Stupid
• Anti-Life Comics: The Great Cookie War
• Wacky Fun Whitey
• Cowboy Bush
• Uncle PennyBags Gets His Due

Have you ever been on a long highway car trip at night? Ever started to count the cars? Ever counted the cars with only one headlight?
Recently, I decided to be a bum for the night. I spent my morning reading in the papers about urban violence rising and how Al Qaeda is somehow threatening our grandmothers' apple pies. After filling my head with all this, I realized that the almighty dollar is one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that people do things - a depressing thought, but if I'm allowed to be a skeptic for a moment, I think it's a valid notion.

Poverty is on the rise in this economy for whatever reason. Does this make people more or less charitable? A valid question, it seems to me. Let me paint the picture of me: dirty, paint-splattered overalls, cut-off t-shirts, broken shoes, stained sweatshirt, and knit hat, pulled halfway down my eyes. Off I went on the subway to the 42nd Street terminal.
I wrote in magic marker "Happy Thanksgiving" on a pizza box, found a cup, and sat down next to a newsstand, leaning amidst the soot and grime of a subway stop. After only about ten minutes, two transit cops approached me, telling me to "move along." I staggered away, plopped down again, this time in an even dustier spot, in the passage between the 7 and the 1/9 trains. Without asking for change, I just held out the cup, and waited with my sign, head craned downward, watching people's shoes speed past.

I began counting people. This was a busy passage for 9:00pm on a Wednesday, approaching 120 people per minute. Throughout the night, literally thousands passed me. Of those thousands, I was stepped on by several dozen, knocked around by luggage bags, and referenced as a "rag" in passing conversation.

Over the course of the evening, an adolescent girl put 35 cents into my cup, two grown men put in a dollar bill each, another young man dropped some change, and one guy offered me an "Au Bon Pain" dinner roll. A grand total of $4.60 had been amassed between four people (I waved off the dinner roll). These people were the unusual "cars with one headlight" in an otherwise streaming highway of foot traffic.

So this is my question: If some folks give change when moved by whatever reason, and some folks don't mind stepping on a bum, then what do the other 98% of folks do? The answer: the new apathy.
People just don't care anymore. Either they are too involved with their own lives, or uninterested in everyone else's. This is a national sentiment, brought on by personalization of so many things: cellular phones, designer clothing, and vanity plates all encourage the stress of "me" and "mine." I am not advocating communism, far from it, but at the same time, there is positively less concern for humanity as a whole.
There was an entirely different mentality three decades ago. People rallied for the homeless, paid attention to canned food drives, and got behind national, if not global, causes. The American collegiate population as a whole saw nowhere near as many protests for the invasion of Iraq as they did for the Vietnam War. The demonstrations against Vietnam ended an American presidency. The meager Iraq demonstrations just compounded the impression that the American youth is happily oblivious.

The truth is, this city disgusts me -- that there can be such indifference. I've hated this place for various reasons over the last few years, but the fact that it can be such a mixed bag of benevolence and indecision shakes my faith in humanity. Far more people walked by than stopped to drop me change or spit at me. I almost respect those who stepped on me more than those who walked by -- at least they showed interest.
Everyone is so concerned with themselves that they fail to see the larger picture; they fail to know what's going on in the world. There was a revolution in Georgia (Tbilisi, not Savannah) a few months ago, and for the first time in a long time, the public won. The armed forces stood aside, the protesters made their voices heard, and the corrupt president fled. Simple as that. How many American collegians knew that? How many collegians read the paper for more than the sports column or style pages? We walk by the crippled, hungry, homeless, and socially bereft in the subway every day, never realizing that they are part of our culture, and we part of theirs.

What is really depressing about all this is I know that this article won't make a damn bit of difference. This is like preaching to the choir; if you've made it to the last hidden pages of this month's Fed, you have less to do than the bums we as a society walk by. So I'll continue trying to give the occasional bum food and clothing, I'll maintain offering up my Snickers Bar spare change, and I'll keep reading the newspaper, and you're welcome to join me - provided you're up to doing the unthinkable: turning off the cell phone and getting some filth on your New Balance throwbacks. The first step is to clip this article,and make the average oblivious friend read it. The first step is to put out one headlight, and be a little different from all the other traffic.