Alms And Gimmicks For The Poor - TheNewYorker

[WillyT]

ALMS AND GIMMICKS FOR THE POOR
POSTED BY EMILY GREENHOUSE - TheNewYorker
AUGUST 19, 2013

<snip>

As a young child, I was frightened of New York City because of its homeless population, frightened to see suffering and poverty as if from out of nowhere. My eyes were on the same level as the eyes-in-recline of homeless people, and I teetered, unsure of how to conduct myself. Growing up has meant becoming acclimated; acting beyond the phenomenon, or even blind to it. When a panhandler makes him or herself known on my morning commute, I no longer so much as scowl as go on scanning the paper on my iPhone. Which makes me a true New Yorker, I tell myself in smugger moments.

Louis CK has a bit in a similar vein to this, in which he describes the cousin of a friend who visits New York, from her farm in New Hampshire, for the first time: “She had never been to any city before,” he begins,

and we’re picking her up at the Port Authority, that smelly hole of a place. We pick her up there, and she’s just freaking out at New York, she’s never seen anything like it. And we pass this homeless guy, and she sees him. I mean, we all passed him—but she saw him. She’s the only one who actually saw him. We didn’t—me and her cousin were just, like, So, he’s supposed to be there, there’s a perfectly good reason why that’s not me and it’s him, the right people always win, I’m sure of it.

In the Port Authority, he says, his friend’s cousin immediately takes a knee beside the man, described as smelly and unwashed. “She goes, ‘Oh, my God, sir, are you O.K.? What happened?’ ” A beat. “What happened?” Louis CK scoffs. “America happened.”

The woman tries to help the homeless man, and Louis and his friend “start correcting her behavior, like she’s doing something wrong.”

“Why, is he O.K.?” she asks.

“No, no, he needs you desperately,” he tells her. “We just don’t do that here… Silly country girl!”

In 2013, the number of homeless people sleeping in New York City shelters each night surpassed fifty thousand for the first time in three decades. Twenty thousand children in the city have no home. The Coalition for the Homeless reports that Bloomberg’s tenure has been especially bad for the community. “The homeless shelter population under Mayor Bloomberg has risen by a staggering 61 percent and the number of homeless families has increased 73 percent,” it reports, a sharper increase “both in absolute numbers and at a higher rate than under Mayors Koch, Dinkins, or Giuliani.” Bloomberg touts his creation of entry-level jobs and admires the improvements he’s made to the city’s education system, yet, as Ken Auletta reports this week in The New Yorker, the Mayor keeps his distance from the full fifth of New Yorkers living below the poverty line. In his spring presentation of the annual budget, Bloomberg did not mention poverty once. On a national scale, according to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, each night in 2012, there were ninety-nine thousand, eight hundred and ninety-four adults experiencing chronic homelessness in America.

<snip>

More: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/08/alms-and-gimmicks-for-the-poor.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true

[Mnemosyne]

1. K&R nt