"Nobody's listening!"

"There has never been a person in an old people's home that hasn't looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body."
--Sebastian Barry, in The Secret Scripture (2008).

I live in subsidized housing for the elderly poor. Nobody can live in my high-rise unless they're at least 62 years old and earn less than $38K a year. (I don't earn anything and have nothing but Social Security to live on, so I'm considered very poor.) It's not exactly an old people's home, but it's the next thing to it. I love my apartment. I'm grateful for it. But sometimes I look around me at these old people, with some surprise and consternation. This is Father Wale, one of my neighbors. At the moment when I made this photograph of him in the little library in our building, he was pounding his fist on his chair-arm and shouting at me, "There's no use in going to Washington to demonstrate for peace. Nobody's listening!"

I told him I'm afraid that's true, but I have to do what I can. If I can find something more useful to do, I'll do that. Meanwhile, I'm going to Washington, and I will stand with whoever else shows up. I can't just sit here and bitch about the wars. I feel I have to DO something, even if nobody important is listening. Those of us who go will listen to each other, and maybe from our gathering we'll get some ideas for what else we can do.

Born in the USA in 1930, Father Wale earned a B.A. from a university in Puerto Rico and taught school children for nearly fifty years in Mexico, Spain, and the Virgin Islands, as well as in the USA. For twenty-three years he taught children of the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation in federal schools near Tucson, Arizona. In his youth he joined the Syro-Chaldean Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church and was ordained as a Priest in their order in 2003. He explains he is a non-stipendiary, non-assigned priest, which means he has never been paid as a priest, but he feels his life is his ministry.

A note on processing: I don't usually do much beyond a slight exposure tweak, but I used "antique" and "edge blur" in iPhoto for this shot.