It’s always ourselves we find in the sea*

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“What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue,” Ayn Rand (1964). This is the second in a series of responses to my recent post, Giving Very Small, reflections on hunger and homelessness in American cities not as detached statistics but as human encounters.

  • You now prompt me to do the same. Now there are three of us throwing starfish back into the surf.
  • My wife and I often carried the apples we grew to people on the street, only to notice that a lot of them threw the fruit into the gutter. You can't trade what they wanted for apples. So then we started bringing food to the food shelter.
  • Those connections, those acts of kindness, are the best way forward.
  • I have often wondered the same thing myself, but also have hesitated, as NYC is so full of grifters posing as AIDS victims, military vets, etc. Maybe a handful of bills and taking a chance is the way to go.
  • Recently, I have found myself frequently annoyed by members of the young punk crowd with their little cardboard signs that say things like "Why lie? I need a beer."  I feel like saying, "You know, there are people on the street who really do need help."
  • One summer in San Francisco, with lots of homeless and/or street people asking for money, I was uncomfortable and conflicted. My friend, a woman of color from Memphis, did not give them any money or even consider doing so. She said that nearly all these people know where the community help organizations are located – the soup kitchens and shelters and drug/alcohol advising centers – that San Francisco has significant numbers of them and has put lots of resources into such programs. She believes that giving the people we pass money does not help them with the larger issues they are facing.
  • Is it about being a lapsed Episcopalian? Or was it Your "Giving Small" post that made me roll down my window for the elderly man I'd passed many times without five bucks for the look on his face? I'll pass that way again. Count on it.

* e.e. cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may” (1956)

Giving Very Small

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It’s an old tale. One morning after a big storm, a wise man walks along a beach covered with starfish. He watches as a small boy bends to pick up a starfish and throw it into the ocean. “What are you doing,” he asks?

“Throwing starfish into the ocean,” the boy replies. “If I don’t, they will die when the sun gets high.”

“But there are tens of thousands of starfish,” says the man. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to make much of a difference.”

The boy picks up another starfish and throws it into the sea. “It made a difference to that one,” he says.

(Cited in Amy Goldstein’s forthcoming Janesville, An American Story, p. 51)

These days, as I walk through the city I pass so many homeless people, often slumped on the sidewalk with a small, sad sign in black magic marker, a note to catch someone’s attention. But there are so many, I’m overwhelmed. How do I choose? What difference can my “spare change” possibly make to this immense tragedy? I look away, not just from their signs but from their faces. I pass by, embarrassed.

I decided to change that. My New Year’s resolution was to take with me each day a certain number of dollar bills and give them away until they are gone. I still have to choose, of course, but not in exactly the same way. Now I have a goal and I have a limit. I don't need to judge worthiness or compare hardships. I only have to give the money away, and since it’s not much money, it’s hardly a sacrifice on my part.

The day after I made the resolution, I got a note from my brother, Walker. It included an article he wrote in which he described his efforts to give something to someone every day, no matter how inconsequential the gift may seem.

Walker is a Buddhist, so I suspect this may come more naturally to him; whereas I am a lapsed Episcopalian, and a more tight-fisted bunch is hard to imagine. (Believe me, I’ve thought about how to make these gifts tax-deductible, although I haven’t yet asked anyone for a receipt.)

The reactions vary. Most are grateful, as much it sometimes seems for the recognition as the small amount of money; a few hardly notice. Because each small gift won’t alleviate the recipient’s distress – nor will they collectively make a dent in the city's poverty – I suppose you could argue they’re little more than random acts of selfishness.

But each transaction is an interaction with another being, someone I do not know, yet may pass by every day. It’s an exchange, and in that moment when I don’t look away – a moment I hope transcends both selfishness and charity – I imagine two people a little happier and a city a little more human.

Read Walker’s article. We could make this a movement.

Elegy in Black and White (Part 2)

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My discovery 40 years ago (Part 1) that white people living in an urban ghetto exhibited many of the behaviors – addiction, crime, truancy, teenage pregnancy – associated with inner-city black life came as a revelation to me. I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. The Moynihan Report (1965) had declared, “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling” and called for a new national goal: “the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.” Three years later, in the wake of US military tanks rumbling through the streets of America’s burning cities, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders concluded: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal,” giving the clear impression that whites had moved to the suburbs while blacks were locked in the ghetto. Meanwhile, voices from the right blamed African Americans – and initiative-robbing welfare programs – for their problems.

And so both sympathetic progressives and antagonistic conservatives came to filter “how class and family affect the poor . . . through a racial prism,” writes J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy. That prism denigrated black culture, and it overlooked white poverty.

Many people have rediscovered white poverty and rural discontent since November 8th, but the stereotype of black culture endures. “To many analysts, terms like ‘welfare queen’ conjure unfair images of the lazy black mom living on the dole,” notes Vance. “I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.”

Instead of focusing on the behaviors people exhibit, as I did in the first sentence, shouldn’t we address, instead, the problems they face? For we will never overcome our divisions until we recognize our common ground.

Elegy in Black and White (Part 1)

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“I’m Ty,” he said as he launched himself from the top of the steps, a tiny human missile heading straight at me, standing on the floor below. It wasn’t the last time I would be startled by Ty’s combination of complete recklessness and complete trust. He was six. He had come, with his shy and far more timid twin brother, Troy, and about 12 others, to an after-school program I had started in an inner-city public housing project in Boston. The year was 1975, and Boston was under a federal court order to desegregate its public school system through a citywide busing program that was met by often-violent resistance in many of the city’s still solidly ethnic neighborhoods.

Ty and Troy lived with their mother in one of those dreary brick-and-concrete housing projects that had been built with good intentions but ended up cut off from the communities around them, insular and menacing to outsiders. I always believed it was lucky for me as well as Ty that I caught him that first afternoon.

He was a great kid, but it was hard to feel optimistic about the future he faced in a place of violence and drugs and all the other pathologies we had been taught to associate with life in an urban ghetto: teenage pregnancies and single-parent families, truancy, vandalism, unemployment, crime.

In one way only did Ty’s neighborhood defy the stereotype: it was entirely white. And not just white, but still predominantly Irish and Catholic, bulwarks I had thought against the disintegration afflicting black families on the other side of the city – families whose children Ty’s neighbors hurled epithets at as the buses rolled through their streets, accompanied by phalanxes of motorcycle cops, while police sharpshooters stood sentinel on the high-school roof.

Clearly, the person who had the most to learn in my after-school program was me.

Talking Past Each Other

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“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” Cool Hand Luke. “I’m so glad I would kiss the captain’s feet . . . now my child can actually play in the park.” Eukeysha Gregory, after the arrest of 120 gang members in the “largest gang takedown” in New York City history.

In a speech a friend sent me, conservative writer Heather MacDonald excoriated the Black Lives Matter movement for “the current frenzy against the police” and the ensuing rise in urban crime, calling it a smokescreen to evade the “taboo topic” and “uncomfortable truth” of black-on-black crime. Since Macdonald can be a poster woman for the unapologetic right – opposing food stamps and welfare, minimizing campus rape, defending religious profiling and torture – I was reflexively prepared to dismiss her arguments.

But I can’t.

Yes, there’s much to disagree with. She paints with a broad brush, simplifying and vilifying a complex movement. And she ignores the personal experiences of a legal system riddled with racial injustice described by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy).

So who’s right? For Eukeysha Gregory, black-on-black crime is not a taboo subject. Nor was it for my late friend, Charity Hicks, who witnessed “a generation of young [Detroit] men so marginalized they would kill you without thinking about it.”

If we talk only to those with whom we agree, we end up choosing sides and standing in judgment above the fray. Our political purity is intact, although our neighborhoods may be burning. If we really want solutions, we need to open our minds and our hearts.

 

Subterranean Samaritan

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“I am an invisible man . . . invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me” (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man). On the train heading north beneath Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, the woman slumped across two seats, clutching her belongings in her arms, three more paper bags on the floor below. She wore a ragged winter coat, and her eyes were closed as she slept, oblivious to the rest of us in the crowded car. It’s an all-too-familiar sight on New York subways, particularly on winter nights when the cars provide refuge and a little warmth for some of the city’s homeless. Standing above her, a tall African-American man prepared to get off at the next stop. When the doors opened, he reached over, put a $20 bill inside her coat and wordlessly left the train. No one saw his act except me. The woman slept on, and I imagined her waking up, perhaps at the end of the line, and finding the money hidden in her coat.

I don’t know whether this single act of kindness made much of a dent in the woman’s life, let alone in the matter of New York’s homelessness, now at its highest level since the Great Depression, with an estimated one in every 147 New Yorkers currently homeless. Nor do I know how many other acts of kindness were happening across the city. All I know is that the world seemed a kinder, more hopeful place.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that showed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise (Luke 10:36-7).

Hope Under Ground

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I was walking last evening through the bowels of Manhattan, the New York subway system beneath Times Square, with thousands of other people hurrying in all directions, absorbed in our own journeys, seeing each other as little more than moving obstacles to be avoided, when a powerful voice pulled me away from my intended path. In a place where musicians, singers and young Black acrobats perform daily for spare change, Alice Tan Ridley sang songs blending gospel and blues that caused weary, distrustful people to stop, to listen and to acknowledge one another. At one point she was joined by a girl of 10 or 11 with a powerful voice for one so young, who appeared and then disappeared back into the crowd. So magical was the moment that even I deposited some greenbacks in the rapidly filling basket. Alice Tan Ridley, it turns out, has been singing in the subway for 20 years, earning money to support her family, which includes her daughter, Gabourey Sidibe, nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for her role in Precious. The 63-year-old Alice appeared on “America’s Got Talent” in 2010 and now tours nationally. Yet here she was, underground, part of Music Under New York, which since 1985 has provided over 7,500 performances annually by more than 350 artists at 30 locations throughout the city’s subway system.

In an underground tunnel, a place known for shoving strangers and urban crime, a metaphor for the dark life of a big city, a moment of beauty appears – a gift of hope for the New Year.

Mean Streets

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Thomas Menino, Boston’s first Italian-American and longest-serving mayor, died last week. “My No. 1 thing,” he said in an interview two years ago, “is bringing racial harmony to the city.” Boston was in the second year of court-ordered busing to desegregate its schools when we moved there in the fall of 1975. Each morning we watched a caravan of yellow buses, filled with black school kids and escorted by police on motorcycles, wind through streets packed with jeering white people and climb to the top of Bunker Hill, where police sharpshooters waited on the roof of Charlestown High School.

For almost a century, Charlestown had been one of Boston’s poorest, toughest and least diverse neighborhoods, almost 100% white and overwhelmingly Irish-American. Its decrepit public-housing project below the Tobin Bridge exhibited the same pathologies – high crime, single mothers, school dropouts – which Daniel Moynihan had ascribed to the black ghetto.

It was a tense time in Boston, where politics was dominated by an uneasy alliance of Irish- and Italian-Americans who pandered to the city’s long history of ethnic hatreds and fortress neighborhoods. Menino, who lived his entire life just blocks from his birth, knew firsthand that Boston’s neighborhoods are also its strength – and instead of using his own heritage as a wall against outsiders and a barrier to change, he cited it as the basis for reaching out to immigrants and minorities. He had been there too, and he recognized that Boston's diverse peoples could be harnessed for its common good.

Fifty Years Later

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In the last couple of months, ISIS has beheaded two Americans, Ebola has claimed one life in Texas and infected a second person, and police officers in and around St. Louis have killed two black teenagers. Every one is a tragedy. But only two of the three have become headliners on the national political debate circuit. Guess which one hasn’t? We have effectively declared war on ISIS, getting ready to deploy troops to Turkish bases, and we are scrambling to set up a defensive perimeter against Ebola amid rising demands that we secure our borders against both. But 52 years after Michael Harrington described the “invisible land” of the poor in The Other America, 50 years after Lyndon Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America,” and 46 years after the Kerner Commission described a nation “moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal,” we turn our backs on St. Louis.

It’s not fashionable on any part of the political spectrum these days to return to the rhetoric of the 1960s, and much has changed radically since then. But on the persistent pockets of poverty and despair in our cities, where unemployment rates are unconscionably high and educational opportunities are almost non-existent, we continue to turn our backs.

I have little doubt we will contain ISIS and quarantine Ebola, but containment and quarantine are not strategies for revitalizing our cities, and this country's future really depends on whether we have the will to address the injustices at home. 

A Lost Generation

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The scene in the courtroom was almost as harrowing as the incident on the street. As four men were bound over for last month’s vicious beating of Steve Utash, their supporters laughed and jeered obscenely, while Utash remained hospitalized in critical condition. He had been driving through a Detroit neighborhood when his truck hit a young boy who had run into the street. When Utash stopped to help, he was attacked and would now be dead but for the intervention of Deborah Hughes, a retired nurse who has seen two of her own children die in the city. Utash is white. His attackers are black. This is the Detroit I know primarily through the eyes of my friend Charity Hicks, who talks despondently of a generation of young men so marginalized that they put little value on human life. With rates of poverty and unemployment far higher than during the Great Depression, much of Detroit has become a wasteland of alcohol, drugs and violence. And no one knows what to do.

• Build more prisons? We already have the world’s highest incarceration rate, which has more than tripled in 40 years.

• Stop coddling the poor? We already pay less for food stamps than prisons and more for prisons than schools.

• Hope they stay in the inner city, killing themselves and each other? Then, as Steve Utash showed, we’d better not go there.

• Launch a New Deal-like jobs program? We have a Congress that won’t authorize a dime for such things.

So we turn our backs, lock our communities and create a system of apartheid that is an American tragedy.

But if you go into these cities, into these neighborhoods, you see signs of hope trying to bloom, signs I'll explore in future posts.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

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Detroit, which is 83% black, made headlines by electing its first white mayor since 1973. The significance of that result is clouded by the fact that (1) the state-appointed emergency manager makes all key decisions for this bankrupt city and (2) 80% of the people didn’t bother to go to the polls. “This city,” my friend Charity Hicks said, “has given up on government.” Yet, like every desert when you look closely, Detroit is teeming with life. The city, said Jamie Shea, who guided me through this underworld, attracts risk takers because “ideas are welcome and you can make an impact.” Ideas like:

  • A hydroponics farm in Detroit’s most desolate neighborhood.
  • Detroit Soup, which hold monthly dinners where “for $5, you get soup, salad, bread and a vote” for one of the entrepreneurs presenting a social-impact project.
  • The Empowerment Plan, where homeless women make winter coats that turn into sleeping bags for homeless women.
  • A project to sell organic food in the city’s ubiquitous liquor stores because “that’s where people shop.”
  • Sit On It Detroit, which turns repurposed hardwood into bus stop benches with attached bookshelves to create interactive outdoor libraries.

In this third-world city where three of five children live in poverty, an exciting movement is incubating: the ingenuity of entrepreneurs is melding with the social conscience of community organizers to produce a “third way” – that navigates between a capitalism obsessed with profits and a government entrenched in bureaucracy to create mission-driven projects focused on the needs of people and the health of communities.

The Big Empty

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There is an emptiness about Detroit that you feel everywhere in this sprawling 139-square-mile city. Weeds grow in empty lots, creating neighborhoods of lonely, locked and isolated houses. The dark window frames of 78,000 derelict buildings stare down like indifferent eyes. The sidewalks are empty, especially at night, in a city where violent crime is epidemic and half the streetlights don’t work. The city’s population has declined from 1.8 million in 1950 to less than 700,000 today – a quarter of the residents have left since 2000. Over half the property owners are tax-delinquent, two-thirds of the murders are unsolved, 20 percent of the housing stock is vacant. Detroit has suffered an extreme form of the inner-city decline that has afflicted all urban America: post-WWII white flight transformed a melting pot of ethnic groups in 1950 to a city 80-percent black and overwhelmingly poor. Racial redlining bred de facto segregation. Government corruption is rampant – former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick began a 28-year prison sentence last month – as are crime and drugs. The hollowing out of American manufacturing staggered the greatest manufacturing city in America.

Detroit was also a victim of its success. The modern city was built by and for the automobile industry, whose cars took people off the sidewalks and sped them out of their neighborhoods in insulated bubbles. Detroit’s grand boulevards and ubiquitous freeways cut through and killed struggling communities.

Yet, as in all deserts, if you look closely you will find Detroit teeming with life, which I will try to describe next time.

Detritus

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Early one morning, as I was walking near the campus of Kean University in Union, New Jersey, I happened upon a garbage truck picking up the neighborhood trash, black plastic bags neatly piled on the curb. It was the start of a 98-degree day, the three men were already sweating, the garbage smelled, and the truck was obnoxiously loud. I was offended by this assault on my tranquility and resented the garbage men who caused it. That evening I showed my class Poet of Poverty, a film about Camden, New Jersey, one of the most blighted cities in America. Camden is, literally, the garbage dump for the state. Because its people are powerless and poor, the legislature has put in its neighborhoods the state prison, the county’s trash-to-steam incinerator and the sewage treatment plant. “It is,” said Father Michael Doyle, who has served in Camden since 1968, “as if all the toilet bowls in the county are lined up on Camden, and every flush says – to Camden, to Camden, to Camden.” The stench, particularly on a hot summer day, is overwhelming, and Camden is an assault on America’s image of itself.

Neither the garbage men nor Camden create the stench we blame them for. Their role is to get it out of the noses of the rest of us, so we can continue in the belief that we take care of ourselves when we put our trash in black plastic bags and set them on the curb for removal from our neighborhood.

Farming in the Rubble

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If you have never seen an entire city privatized, keep your eye on Detroit. Saddled with an $18-billion debt, it is staring into the abyss of bankruptcy. Its demise parallels that of other large industrial cities after World War II, when federal highway, housing and energy policies fueled suburban growth and the massive exodus of middle- and working-class whites, leaving behind an impoverished and segregated city with ballooning social needs and a vaporizing tax base. Detroit’s fall was the steepest and most enduring: it has lost 1.1 million people since 1950. And its tragedy is special: the automobile industry, on which its prosperity depended, pushed relentlessly for policies that benefited General Motors and decimated Detroit. Privatization is a politically explosive word. Progressives point to corporate theft of community resources like water and energy, and conservatives respond with stories of government corruption and market efficiencies. But such rigid dichotomies overlook two kinds of private initiatives on which Detroit’s recovery depends. Already, there are signs of revival in the business district and middle-class housing construction required to build a tax base. But downtown development and gentrification must not overrun the burgeoning efforts of devastated communities to rebuild themselves. Right now, Detroit has a non-cash underground economy that relies on informal networks and barter systems to support 150,000 people, a fifth of its population. There are 27 urban farms of an acre or more and 1,800 community gardens. “Agriculture in the city,” says community activist Charity Hicks, “is the way of resilience and the means of resistance.” This is privatization that must be nurtured.

Big City Blues

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America has long loathed its big cities. At least since Thomas Jefferson’s vision of sturdy yeoman farmers as the backbone of the nation (never mind that Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves), we have looked on our cities as places of filth and disease, low morals and high crime. So obviously, those places where Americans are most fearful are our big cities. Or not. On a list of the 10 cities where people feel least safe, published by 24/7 Wall Street, New York cannot be found, nor Chicago, Los Angeles nor any of America’s largest cities. Instead, we find Beaumont, Texas; Rockford, Illinois; Yakima, Washington; Stockton, California. The average population is 385,555, and only Memphis has more than a million people. Forbes list of the most murderous cities is less surprising: Washington, New Orleans, Detroit are on it. But even here, the average population is 561,546, and only Philadelphia exceeds a million.

We have too long overlooked the roles our large cities play. They are centers of art and culture, commerce and education. For immigrants, the small-town restless and artists, they are destinations, places of opportunity and personal independence. “City air makes men free” went the old adage, and serfs could actually claim their freedom in medieval cities. And cities are not just composed of millions of rootless people. They are characterized by communities, both of interest and ethnicity. Dynamic cities do not fail; stagnant cities do – and it is in our smaller and declining cities, where opportunity has disappeared and communities have eroded, that fear rules the streets.

A Food Community

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I think of Michelle Obama as the First Lady of Nutrition, the most environmentally aware person to yet occupy the White House. In March 2009 she planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn to give her family homegrown food, to provide at least a topic of discussion at state dinners, and to create a place where children and teachers could learn about healthy food.

And they need to learn. It seems incongruous that the richest country suffers from such poor nutrition: most American children eat far fewer fruits, vegetables and whole grains than they need, and far more salt. They drink more soda than milk. More than a third of Americans – and half of all African-Americans – are obese. They are overweight and underfed – a combination that seems unfathomable to those of us who equate skeletal images with starvation. But it is real.

Michelle’s efforts brought a blistering response from the food lobby. Organic gardens were elitist, while corporate agriculture could feed the world. The lobby poured millions into fighting taxes on sugary sodas and persuading Congress to declare pizza a vegetable . . . just like catsup.

Nutritional issues are most severe in our inner cities, where the absence of decent markets makes the residents captive to both high prices and unhealthy food. One response is the emergence of community gardens on vacant urban lots. Detroit has over 1500 such gardens. They are small, often isolated. But what a difference they could make if they joined together to grow – and to demand – healthy food for the city's poor.

Beyond the 99 Percent

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Today’s post is an almost-inadvertent addendum to yesterday’s. In the interim I read a review of The Price of Inequality, in which Joseph Stiglitz describes the consequences of the vast inequalities of wealth that now define America, perhaps more than any other nation on Earth. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, argues that our two-tiered society has arisen, not primarily because of either the survival of the fittest or the impact of globalization, but because the rich have become increasingly able to control the political system: “While there may be underlying economic forces at play, politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest.” The result, he says, goes beyond unfairness; it undercuts the virtues of a free market system by promoting inefficiencies, reducing the educated labor pool and not investing in the infrastructure capitalism requires. (Yes, Barack Obama was absolutely right to point out that we don’t do it alone.) My concern is that the focus on a two-tiered society obscures what is happening. This entire political campaign cycle now involves rebuking or vindicating the one percent and toadying up to the mythical middle class, which is everybody else – the 99 percent. Once again, the poor, whose lives are as removed from the middle class as they are from the rich, have become invisible – none more so than the urban poor, who are locked in ghettos from which there is little escape. This is a moral calamity. It is also a tinderbox . . . and every time we reduce essential public services, we add fuel for the flames.