Bad Policy

It was a day when nothing much got done. Yes, I wrote a longish post in the morning, and then it was time to go, time to take the train to 42d street, examine the map, and decide that the A train to Far Rockaway was the ticket out of the city. Time to leave, time to go home.

And what had I seen in New York? Oddly, everything was as normal, except that there seemed to be a new breed of poverty and homelessness. There had always been street people, but they had seemed different—maybe drunks, maybe drugs, maybe just crazy. The point was that they couldn’t fit in—that’s why they were on the streets.

There was the woman sitting halfway down the stairs to the 42nd Street subway. She was sitting on cardboard on the landing; the air was a mix of the 40 degrees outside and the 60 degrees inside. Still, it was cold enough that she was bundled up and yet still shivering. And her sign was clever: Donate What You Can to Polish Your Karma.

Nor was she the only one—there were many more people like her. “One in five of our neighbors can’t put food on their tables,” stated the public service ad on the subway. Is it true? What would a Google search reveal?

Well, as usual, the picture isn’t clear. Yes, the rate of poverty in New York City inched up to 21.2%; it had been 20.9 the year before. But Bloomberg came out blazing—he stated that of the 20 largest cities in the country, New York was the only one whose level of poverty had not risen since 2000. It was 21.2% then, it’s 21.2% now. In other words, it’s gotten worse for every other city except New York.

It’s also true that I was in Manhattan all of the time I was there, unless you count passing through Brooklyn to get to the airport. And The New York Times has this to say about Manhattan:

Manhattan retained the dubious distinction of having the biggest income gap of any big county in the country. The mean income of the lowest fifth was $9,635, compared with $389,007 for the top fifth and $799,969 for the top 5 percent — more than an eightyfold difference between bottom and top.

All of this is based on new data from the Census Bureau, which leads me to wonder—how do you count homeless people? And in fact, looking it up, it appears that the Census Bureau itself has come out and said that its count of the homeless for 2010 was off by three million. Not surprising, really, since many state and city ordinances prohibit sleeping, loitering, or camping in public. So there are a lot of people who go uncounted.

The train to the airport had the usual buskers—in this case a really bad mariachi duo (a singer and an accordion) and a good trio singing songs from the 40s. But nobody except for the out-of-towners—maybe Minnesota nice?—seemed to be giving anything. Oh, and there were the people selling candy for a dollar—often their signs proclaimed them homeless or out of work.

It was a study in contrasts. The city has unimaginable wealth, both now and in the past. And I had been staying with my brother and sister in law, who live on Riverside Drive. Their apartment is hardly palatial, neither is it small; but that’s not the point.

And that is? John and Jeanne are living a bit better than their parents did. They had had good public school educations, they had gone to graduate programs, they were now taking vacations and spending in ways that their parents wouldn’t have dreamed of. And that’s good—that’s the way it should be. The American Dream, right?

Assuming a level playing field, yes. But I sat next to a young black woman and her daughter; mother had clearly picked up the five-year old from school. And her first action, on entering the train? Take out and power up a small tablet and hand it to the girl.

Two days earlier, I had been in a bus in Manhattan watching a white mother talking to her son of roughly the same age. No tablet, instead it was questions to the child—what had he learned at school, was his teacher happy with the class, was everybody there? By the end of ten blocks, the mother had gotten the boy to remember the material presented in school, had reinforced it, and had added to it.

Nor is it a white / black thing. There were black guys in very good three-piece suits who were getting on and off the subway in midtown New York. But I would wager any money that their parents had done the same thing that the woman on the bus in Manhattan was doing.

“I am a girl, and I am beautiful just the way I am,” the child with the tablet on the subway began to recite. She was reading a poster on the train. And as kids at that age will do, she started to repeat it endlessly.

I know what the lady on the bus would have done. She would have agreed, she would have probed—what were the best things about you, she would have asked. What things are most important to you? What kind of person do you like and what kind of person do you want to be?

The mother on the train shushed her child up.

Which was a shame, really, because the child was obviously very intelligent. There’s something about the eyes, you know, and the quickness of response to stimuli—you could tell this kid could go places.

“It was my librarian,” said Jeanne, when I asked who had made the difference in her life. Her parents had never read, never even completed high school—but the librarian had hooked Jeanne on books, and gave her the message: you’re sharp, you’ll go far.

Will there be anyone there for the little girl, who is beautiful just the way she is? Or will our cuts in education, arts programs, and Head Start mean that only the rich have a shot at a better life? I wish we could see that neglecting people, and especially kids, has another dimension than morality or equality.

It’s also disastrous economic policy.