Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (8 page)

Surely there are more churches and synagogues out there that could do this. Surely a shelter in the basement would do more to teach the values that are supposed to inform the holidays than a hundred sermons.

Surely there is more connection with Christmas in setting up cots and serving stew than in the frenetic round of the season, which is habitually cited as exhausting and rarely as satisfying. Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders’ cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.

We question the efficiency of government, and with good cause. We say that something permanent needs to be done, and that is true. And if we agree that government has done a rotten job reducing the quotient of human misery, Mr. Brown has an alternative: Do it yourself.

“I work in midtown,” says Mr. Brown, who is a vice president in futures and options at Dean Witter, “and I saw these poor souls on the subway grates. We’re just trying to do what Christ asked us to do.” That is, to do good. Boy, does that seem distant from the white noise of modern life. “If I am for myself alone, what good am I?” said the Jewish sage Hillel two thousand years ago, around the time that his coreligionists Mary and Joseph found themselves homeless in Bethlehem. And if the time to act is not now, when will it be?

NO PLACE LIKE HOME
May 20, 1992

The building is beautiful, white and beige and oak, the colors of yuppies. The rehab of the Rio came in seven-hundred-thousand dollars under budget, two months ahead of schedule. The tenants say they will not mess it up, no, no, no. “When you don’t have a place and you get a good place, the last thing you want to do is lose it,” said one man who slept in shelters for seven years—seven years during which you might have gotten married, or lost a loved one, or struck it rich, but all this guy did was live on the streets.

Mayor David Dinkins has announced that he will study parts of the study he commissioned from a commission on the homeless, the newest in a long line of studies.

One study, done in 1981, was called “Private Lives, Public Spaces.” It was researched by Ellen Baxter, who now runs the nonprofit company that has brought us the Rio and four other buildings that provide permanent housing for the homeless in Washington Heights.

Another study, done in 1987, was called “A Shelter Is Not a Home” and was produced by the Manhattan Borough president, David Dinkins, who now runs the city of New York. At the time, the Koch administration said it would study Mr. Dinkins’s study, which must have taught Mr. Dinkins something.

Robert Hayes, one of the founding fathers of the movement to help the homeless, once told me there were three answers to the problem: housing, housing, housing. It was an overly simplistic answer, and it was essentially correct.

Despite our obsessions with pathology and addiction, Ms. Baxter has renovated one apartment building after another and filled them with people. At the Rio, what was once a burnt-out eyesore is now, with its curving façade and bright lobby, the handsomest building on the block; what were once armory transients with dirt etched in the creases of hands and face are now tenants. The building needed people; the people needed a home. The city provided the rehab money; Columbia University provides social service support.

Some of the tenants need to spend time in drug treatment and some go to Alcoholics Anonymous and some of them lapse into pretty pronounced fugue states from time to time. So what? How would you behave if you’d lived on the streets for seven years? What is better: To leave them out there while we lament the emptying of the mental hospitals and the demise of jobs? Or to provide a roof over their heads and then get them psychiatric care and job training?

What is better: To spend nearly $20,000 each year to have
them sleep on cots at night and wander the streets by day? Or to make a onetime investment of $38,000 a unit, as they did in the single rooms with kitchens and baths in the Rio, for permanent homes for people who will pay rent from their future wages or from entitlement benefits?

Years ago I became cynical enough to envision a game plan in which politicians, tussling over government stuff like demonstration projects and agency jurisdiction and commission studies, ignored this problem until it went away.

And, in a sense, it has. We have become so accustomed to people sleeping on sidewalks and in subway stations that recumbent bodies have become small landmarks in our neighborhoods. Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, says she was stunned, talking to students, at their assumption that people always had and always would be living on the streets. My children call by pet names—“the man with the cup,” “the lady with the falling-down pants”—the homeless people around their school.

And when a problem becomes that rooted in our everyday perceptions, it is understood to be without solution. Nonprofit groups like the one that renovated the Rio prove that this is not so. The cots in the armory are poison; drug programs and job training are icing. A place to shut the door, to sleep without one eye open, to be warm, to be safe—that’s the cake. There’s no place like home. You didn’t need a study to figure that out, did you?

SOMALIA’S PLAGUES
September 6, 1992

The two children are the last survivors of their family, but not, it appears, for long. In news footage they sit naked on the ground, their spindly arms wrapped around each other, the inevitability of their imminent death in their sunken eyes. In their homeland, rent by internal power struggles, there is no food, and so they starve while worlds away the politicians puzzle over what to do.

But these children are not in Bosnia, now the center of world attention. They are in Somalia, an African country living through—and dying of—a lethal combination of clan warfare, drought, and famine that has wrought what one U.S. official called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now.

Millions of people in Somalia are in danger of starving to death in the months to come. Hundreds will die today. Although the International Red Cross has mounted the largest relief effort in its history, it is too dangerous to take food to some areas, and supplies are often stolen by gunmen and sold by profiteers. Relief
kitchens have graveyards flanking them, so that those who die on food lines may be buried while the line moves on.

Eurocentrism was a kind of catchword not long ago amid the scornful discussion of multicultural curricula in the public schools. Were we going to throw out Shakespeare, cease to teach the Magna Carta, minimize the role of Napoleon in world affairs?

But the truth is that we are a deeply Eurocentric nation, and for obvious reasons. Many of us have Euroroots, and from the beginning we have sought Euroalliances. When we hear of Serbian-run concentration camps we relate them, with renewed outrage, to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. When Americans see Bosnian orphans crying in the windows of buses, offers pour in to adopt them.

Bosnia, with all its horrors, is at the center of public and political dialogue, and Somalia, with all its horrors, is a peripheral discussion. “It’s racism,” says Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty International.

And a peculiar sort of myopic ignorance. Civil war and unconscionable internment in Bosnia seem man-made evils, subject to man-made solutions. But Africa is a mystery to our Eurocentric nation, even to many African-Americans. Its troubles seem like Old Testament plagues, irresolvable and inevitable.

There is nothing inevitable about the corpses littering the landscape of Somalia. There are no easy solutions for a nation of nomads who have been prevented from planting crops by the ravages of civil war, a country that has almost no government aside from village elders in dying towns.

There are no easy solutions in the former Yugoslavia, either, where factional hatreds are a tangled web stretching back centuries. But there is now sharply focused attention by the international community on what should be done and who should do it. Somalia deserves that same intense attention, from George Bush, Bill Clinton, the American people, and our allies abroad.

The United Nations has agreed to airlift food into the interior, but that is neither an adequate nor a long-term solution. Senator
Nancy Kassebaum, who sits on the Senate subcommittee on African affairs, supports the use of an international force of soldiers to make sure food shipments get to the people. But she also says the United States must have a continuing commitment to development in African nations instead of a crisis-management approach.

Just a year ago some of us, unpersuaded by the high moral principles involved in giving our all for cheap oil, were saying that America could no longer afford to police the world. With the president’s Gulf-war bluster about liberation, we lost sight of the best reason to involve ourselves in foreign affairs—because it is sometimes obviously the moral thing to do.

The new secretary general of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian who is the first leader of the U.N. from the continent of Africa, has referred to the Bosnian conflict as the “rich man’s war.” He means it is a white man’s war, a Eurowar, in its combatants, its victims, and its international interest. That makes aid no less necessary. Just as the color of its children must make no difference in our help for Somalia. Surely our attention span can encompass two mortal crises at once. Surely our empathy can transcend race.

SEEKING A SENSE OF CONTROL
December 10, 1990

Many years ago I took a stroll around the block with the mother of a friend. As we walked she made sudden noises, like shots from a gun. But when I listened carefully it seemed that the sounds were orphaned bits of words, as though her conversation were a tape and most of it had been erased, leaving only stray fricatives and glottal stops. Perhaps the sounds were the remaining shreds of her personality, which had been taken into some dark place by a then little-known ailment called Alzheimer’s disease.

This may have been the sort of life Janet Adkins feared when she lay in a Volkswagen van and pressed the button that released lethal drugs into her body. Mrs. Adkins’s doctor believed she had years to go before her self disappeared into the degenerative swamp of Alzheimer’s. But anyone who has ever encountered the disease knows its Catch-22; by the time you might want to die, you’re too far gone to do anything about it. Mrs. Adkins, a former English teacher, looked into the future and committed suicide.

If she had done so alone, her story would be a small one. But she went to Jack Kevorkian, a euthanasia entrepreneur who constructed a suicide machine at home. Mrs. Adkins used it to go quietly into that good night. And Dr. Kevorkian was charged with first-degree murder.