SAY NO!

TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS

FOR THE HOMELESS!

and:

WHAT ABOUT US?

WHERE DO WE FIT IN?

and Dan’s favorite:

ARE WE OUR

BROTHER’S KEEPER?

OR DO WE TELL

BIG BROTHER TO KEEP HIM?

“All right,” he said, shouting so he could be heard in the back.  “Let me say this once more in case some of you have forgotten: We’re not here to cause trouble.  We’re here to draw attention to a problem that cannot be solved by putting you folks in camps.  We’re here for informational purposes.  To communicate, not to confront.  Stay in line, don’t block traffic, don’t enter the hotel, don’t fight, don’t panhandle.  Got that?”

Most of them nodded.  He had been pounding this into them all week.  Those who could get the message had already got it.  This last harangue was for the benefit of the press microphones and the police within earshot, to get it on the record that this was intended as a strictly peaceful demonstration.

“Where’s Sister Carrie?” someone of them asked.

That had to be One-thumb George, but Dan couldn’t place him in the crowd.  George had asked the question at least a dozen times since they’d left Tompkins.

“Sister Carrie is in her room at the convent, praying for us.  Her order doesn’t allow her to march in demonstrations.”

“I wish she was here,” the voice said, and now Dan was sure it was One-thumb George.

Dan too wished Carrie were here.  She’d done as much as he to organize this march, maybe more.  He missed her.

“And I’m sure she wishes she could be here with us,” Dan shouted.  “So let’s make her proud!  Waldorf, ho!”

Pointing his arm uptown like an officer leading a charge, he jumped off the sculpture base and marched his troops the remaining blocks.  He was just starting to position the group when Senator Crenshaw’s limousine pulled up before the entrance.  Dan had a brief glimpse of the senator’s head—the famous tanned face, dazzling smile, and longish, salt-and-pepper hair—towering over his entourage as he zipped across the sidewalk, and then he was through the front doors and gone.

Damn!  He’d shown up early.

He heard groans from the demonstrators but he shushed them.

“It’s okay.  We’ll be all set up for him when he comes out.  And we’re not leaving until he does.”

They spent the interval marching in an oval within the area reserved for their demonstration, demarcated by light blue horses stenciled in white with Police Line - Do Not Cross.  Dan led them in chants updated from the sixties, like: “Hey, hey, Arthur C., why you wanna imprison me?” and “Hell, no!  We won’t go!”  And of course there were the endless repetitions of “We Shall Overcome.”

The choices were calculated.  Dan wanted to bring to mind the civil rights marches and anti-war protests of the sixties to anyone who saw this particular demonstration on TV.  Many of the movers and shakers in the country today—the President included—had participated in those demonstrations in their youth; many of them still carried a residue of nostalgia for those days.  He hoped enough of them would realize that but for luck and the grace of God they might be marching on this line tonight.

As he marched and led the chants and singing, Dan felt alive.  More truly alive than he had in years.  His priestly routines had become just that—routine.  Hearing confession, saying Mass, giving sermons—it seemed little more than preaching to the converted.  The souls who truly needed saving didn’t go to Mass, didn’t take the sacraments.  His priestly duties around the altar at St. Joseph’s had become...empty.

But when he left the main floor and went downstairs to the soup kitchen in the basement—the place he’d dubbed Loaves and Fishes—then he felt as if he truly were doing God’s work.

God’s work...Dan had to smile at the phrase.  Wasn’t God’s work for God to do?  Why was it left to mere mortals like him and Carrie to do God’s work?

And lately, in his darkest moments, Dan had begun wondering if God was doing anything.  The world—at least the part of it in which he spent his days—was, to put it bluntly, a fucking mess.  Everywhere he looked people were sick, hurt or dying—from AIDS, from racism, from drugs, from child abuse, from stabbings, shootings, or just plain old kick-ass muggings.  And the violence was escalating.  Every time Dan told himself it can’t get any worse than this, sure enough, it did.

And every year there seemed to be more homeless—more lost souls.

Tighten up on the misery spigot, will you, God?  We’re up to our lower lips down here.

Yeah.  Where was the hand of God in all this?  Why wasn’t it doing God’s work?  A long, continuous howl of agony was rising from this city, this world.  The Middle East was ablaze with a fire that might never burn out; when Muslim factions weren’t targeting infidels, they were targeting each other.  Suicide bombers in Israel, reprisals in Palestine, race riots if Paris, bombings in London.  And Africa—a perpetual cycle of slaughter, famine, AIDS.

Was Anybody listening?  Why didn’t He respond?  Dan could do only so much.

Like tonight.  This was doing something—or at least Dan hoped it was.  An infinitesimal something.  Who knew if it would accomplish anything?  All you could do was try.

And then word came out that the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner was over.  The doorman started signaling the hovering limos forward.  Taxis nosed in like koi at feeding time.  Dan pulled Dirty Harry out of the line and set him in the middle of the circle.

“All right, everybody!  He’s coming.  Chant as loud as you can.  Harry’s going to lead you.”

“Me?” Harry said.  He had long greasy hair, a thick beard matted with the remains of his last three meals, and probably hadn’t changed his four or five layers of clothing since the winter.  “I dunno what to—”

“Just keep leading them in the same stuff we’ve been doing all night,” Dan told him.  “And give me your posters.  I want to get up close.”

Harry lifted the sandwich-board placards over his head and surrendered them with obvious reluctance.  Dan grabbed them, waved, and hurried off.  He didn’t dare slip them over his own head—not after Dirty Harry had been wearing them.

He headed for the Waldorf entrance.  As he squeezed between two of the barricade horses, one of the cops moved to block his way but let him pass when he saw the collar.

Ah, the perks of the Roman collar.

Celebrity gawkers, political groupies, and the just plain curious had formed a gauntlet along the path from the Waldorf entrance.  Dan pushed, squirmed, wheedled, and elbowed his way to the front row where anyone exiting the hotel would have an unobstructed view of the sandwich-board’s message:

CONCENTRATION

CAMPS ARE

UNAMERICAN!

Finally he saw his man.  Senator Crenshaw appeared at the door.  He stopped inside the glass, shaking hands and smiling at some of the hundreds of people who’d plunked down a grand for a chicken dinner.  Dan ground his teeth as he calculated how many people he could feed at St. Joe’s for the cost of just one of those dinners.

He watched him through the glass and reviewed what he knew about Senator Arthur Crenshaw, the Silicon Valley giant.  At age thirty, he’d started CrenSoft on a shoestring.  His software innovations earned him huge profits, which he plowed back into the company, which in turn yielded even larger profits.  When Microsoft bought him out for an ungodly sum, he traded the corporate rat race for politics.  He didn’t start small.  He challenged an incumbent for one of his native California’s US Senate seats and won.  Now he had his eye on the Presidency.  He hadn’t declared himself yet, but no one seemed to have any doubt that come next winter he’d be stumping in New Hampshire when the next round of Presidential primaries rolled around.