The 48-hour angel.

It looks like we all better find another career by 2009 when Emilio Estevez releases his movie, The Public, about the 48-hours when "a conscientious librarian tends to the homeless and mentally ill people who use the public library as a homeless shelter" during the two coldest days of the year, in Los Angeles.

I remember when I first read Chip Ward's article about the homeless and mentally ill situation in Salt Lake City Public Library. It was one of those moments of, "Yeah! Get those crazy people out of our library." But obviously, I didn't get it. Chip doesn't want the crazy people out of the library; he wants a social service network created to make the crazy people normal by creating housing and job training programs. He believes we all need to change.

The belief that we are responsible for each other's social, economic, and
political well-being, that we will care for our weakest members compassionately,
should be the keystone in the moral architecture of a democratic culture. We
will not stand by while our fellow citizens are deprived of their fellowship and
citizenship — which is why we ended racial segregation and practices like poll
taxes that kept disenfranchised Americans powerless. We will not let children
starve. We do not consign orphans to the streets like they do in Brazil or let
children be sold into prostitution as they do in Thailand. We are proud of our
struggles to meet people's basic needs and to encourage inclusion. Why, then,
are the mentally ill still such an exception to those fundamental standards?

America is proud of its hyper-individualism, our liberation from the bonds of
tribe and the social constraints of traditional societies. We glorify the
accomplishments of inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneers, and artists.
But while some individuals thrive and the cutting edge of our technology is
wondrous, the plight of the chronically homeless tells me that our communities
are also fragmented and disintegrating. We may have gained the world and lost
each other.
(from the Atlantic Free Press)

Now Chip is retired (and interviewed in the latest LJ), Emilio is relatively rich and famous, and librarians are waiting for things to get worse. Me, I'd love to change. Make me rich and famous so I don't have to work in the library after 2009 when this movie gets released and every crazy person in America shows up at our front door looking for Emilio to give them cookies and a cup of coffee.

Otherwise, I still gotta pay the bills.