Let's recount what I have earned for myself this week:
Monday-$57.50
Tuesday-$77.50
Wednesday-$23.00
Today-$0.50
Today, they sent me to a neighborhood that was quite simply
dangerous. I have been in many bad neighborhoods in my life but this may
well have been the worst. It's in New Orleans. Signs had been put up on
the telephone poles saying THOU SHALT NOT KILL with NOT underlined. Since
I haven't seen these signs in every neighborhood I've been to, I can only
assume that something might have prompted the putting up of these signs.
I was assigned 3 streets, but I didn't go to the end of any of them. When
I reached the point where every house I could see was boarded up and
covered in spray paint, I decided that I was done with that particular
street.
I thought it was quite thoughtful of them to send me to a
neighborhood with CRIPS spray-painted in so many places since the one I
was in yesterday had BLOODS painted quite largely across the street in
red paint. I'm glad we give both gangs equal time. Quite touching really.
One of the women whose house I went to had a shirt that said I'll
See You At the Crossroads and had a picture of her neighbor who had been
shot and killed recently on the front. Of the people I talked to,
literally half did not have cars. Now I noticed that when you are raising
money for a group trying to reform car insurance in the state and to
bring down car insurance rates, for some odd reason, people without cars
do not seem all that inclined to contribute. Not that they really had
much to contribute. 25 people signed my petition and 10 of those in the
space for phone number wrote "no phone."
People tended to look at me like I was a complete idiot. They
seemed to be thinking, "We're only here because we live here and we're
certainly not stupid enough to go around knocking on everyone's doors."
Even though I am supposed to keep canvassing after dark, I decided that I
did not want to be in the neighborhood then and that it wouldn't matter
because it was pretty obvious that nobody would answer their doors after
dark. So I went to the pick-up point a little early and waited around for
a long time.
Anyway, that was my day at work.