hschmidt07's blog

             This reflection is based on the following statement by John Dewey under his Article 1 of My Pedagogic Creed:

What do street people or unhoused people want? Family, work, drugs? How many of them sell drugs, are ex-convicts, are fueled by the desire for drugs, or have debilitating mental disorders?

What kind of work would drug dealers do if drugs were legalized? In some places, specifically 6th avenue in NYC, some unhoused people make money by selling informally on the street:  books, scavenged magazines, or other scavenged things from dumpsters. In this culture, only the sober sellers are respected, and many make attempts and have aspirations to become booksellers. They make $50-200 a day. The scavengers make about $50 a day, and the panhandlers make an average of $75 a day. These people claim that they have chosen this life, and that they are the authors of their lives. Yet what is the structural similarity across the lives of these folks, primarily middle aged black men? And what is the major structural difference in the lives of black men who succeed in the corporate world?