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.
