Flickr photo by v1rotate

My phone rang moments after the cable news networks announced on Tuesday night that Sen. Barack Obama was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. "Did you believe that this could happen in our lifetime?" my neighbor asked me, wanting to bring over a bottle of wine so we could clink glasses and celebrate. "Aren’t you excited?"

Of course; this is huge, I said. In a nation built on racism, a man in whom symbolically flows the blood of the oppressors and the blood of the oppressed stands to become the Democratic nominee for president.

But I was preoccupied with the fate of another black man last night.

He’s 20 years old, and for about six weeks, until this past Saturday, he was living in the basement of my house, teetering precariously between life at the ground floor of the nation’s economy and the pit of homelessness and desperation that lies below it.

I got to know this man, whose name I’m withholding to protect his privacy, and his family several years ago through my partner’s connection to Capitol Hill Group Ministries, an organization that offers various types of support to young families in economic distress. He comes from a family with three other siblings, each from a separate father. On his birth certificate, where his father’s name should appear, is a row of asterisks.

His early childhood includes being bounced among other relatives and a stint at Boy’s Town, a Washington residential facility for troubled youth. By the time I met him, he was living with his mother but was struggling both academically and attitudinally in school. His seeming lack of initiative, focus and ambition finally caught up with him in the 12th grade, when his grades were so bad he couldn’t graduate and had to repeat.

At least he finally did graduate. In the District of Columbia, 17 percent of the men in the city between the ages of 18 and 25 have yet to get a high school diploma, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Several people pushed so that he would not be in that number, and he responded.

But now he’s a man-child in search of the promised land, and the journey isn’t off to a good start. He’s got a notch-above-minimum-wage job at a local Wal-Mart, but this is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. According to the Center for Housing Policy, it takes an hourly wage of $21.81 to be able to afford the average one-bedroom apartment in Washington.

That’s skewed, of course, by the thousands of luxury apartments springing up in and around the city, but it still says something about how high the bottom rung of the housing ladder is. If you’re earning the typical big-box store salary, between $1,000 and $1,200 a month after taxes, try finding what the federal government would consider an affordable apartment, one that wouldn’t eat more than 30 percent of your monthly earnings. Last year, a friend managed to get a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of what had been a drug and gang war zone in the depths of far Southeast. The rent was $610 a month, roaches included.

But the economic obstacles pale next to the psychological ones. I have always saw this guy as being a few years less mature than he should be for his age. But I don’t think that’s even close to the full story. To get to the bottom of that story, I realized as he lived with me, he needs a couple of sessions with a good psychatrist. He has many of the signs of depression, including an inability to take initiative to confront and solve problems and a sometimes stunning nonchalance. Given his unstable childhood, it would be a miracle not to have psychological problems. And, as several studies have indicated, there is a fairly strong correlation between poverty and mental illness.

But how does someone who works the afternoon-night shift at a bog-box discount store supposed to get a psychiatrist? Ask an advocate for the homeless: if you have little or no money, you’ll have little to no luck getting the mental health services you need.

All of this is running through my mind as Obama is giving what all of the pundits are saying is a remarkable speech consolidating his position as the Democratic nominee as president. My 20-year-old friend is one of the people that Obama must be able to reach down and touch — not to win his vote, but to show that America can be more than a Darwinian free-for-all, that we can marshal the goodness of our country and its people to help those who want to help themselves but just can’t seem to get there, that we will stop insisting that people climb an economic ladder that they can’t reach but will instead commit to offering them both a living wage and affordable housing.

Knowing this guy as I do, he wasn’t watching the cable news shows on Tuesday night, as I was, pondering this historic moment. He was probably watching ESPN or a mindless sitcom in the apartment of a co-worker who generously took him in this past weekend, on the last day of my rigidly imposed deadline for him to find a place to stay. Perhaps he’ll learn of Obama’s accomplishment through the excited talk of his co-workers the next day, and he might wonder what difference this will make to him. And so will I.

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