There's only one homeless man left in Times Square
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
While I was hoping this article would have more information on his background, I am glad to now have a name that I can say hello to when I walk by.
Those aren't humanitarians, those are enforcers for the bourgeoisie who don't want to have to look at poor black people every day.
But I think the point is valid: a lot of work to help "the homeless" is ultimately motivated more by removing eyesores and eliminating guilt-trips than actually helping people. Out of sight, out of mind.
And yes, I know it's human nature, but that doesn't make it right.
The city government, city council, and general people are more interested in removing eye-sores and guilt trips. But by and large the aid workers are genuine - heck, they are the only people who seem to perceive the homeless as people.
So the question is, who are these aid workers working for - if they represent the city directly, then yeah, I'd be inclined to call shenanigans. If they represent an apolitical aid organization though, I'd be hesitant to make that accusation.
Part of the complexity of the situation is that a lot of the homeless have severe mental illnesses, and many are dangers to themselves because of it. This is why I don't immediately jump to the "enforcer" conclusion - it may very well be that the social workers are trying to get him to a place where his mental illness may be treated.
Personally I'm against efforts by cities to simply get the homeless out of sight - I think most people in society sorely need a daily reminder of just how lucky they are, and how much they are not doing to lift up those around them. Let the ugliness and ills of the city shine openly, it's the only way we will ever be compelled to fix them.
I guess it was just the tone of the article, how they were focusing so much on Times Square, with nary a mention of homelessness in other parts of the city. One contented homeless guy isn't a bad thing - good job. Check on him every few weeks, and move on to people who really do need help. And who might not be in such a prominent location.
christian missionaries are completely well intentioned, but its still proselytization as is this...
would you like jesus in your life? no? what about now?
Vis-a-vis your OT remarks:
Man A (to Suicidal man on a ledge): Would you like to come down now?
Man B: No
Man A: What about now?
...
A: Don't jump!! Come down! We want to help you! B: No thanks I actually live up here, and wasn't planning on jumping... A: ....Don't jump!! Come down! We want to help you!
At one point does it become clear the guy isn't actually going to jump? 10 years? 15? 50?
my jab at christian missionaries was a metaphor that i guess just makes sense to me, but basically was trying to illustrate that often those who look like they need help dont, and often to the response to "no thanks i dont need help" is (especially from missionaries) "oh, you just dont get what im offering, here let me explain."
Apologies for the off-topic.
Not only is the majority of missionary work well intentioned, but missionaries have a complex first-hand understanding of social problems small-scale and large-, and can do an incredible amount of good. (I say this as a steadfast athiest.)
Christian missionary work has in the past, and sometimes continues to have, an ugly side. But unless you have some direct experience with what spending a lifetime trying to help people at an individual level is like, your blanket condemnation is neither useful nor appropriate.
Anthropologists and the other two are very different...anthropologists mostly don't raise social movements. In fact even having their actual presence known in the field is mostly considered a downside as it affects the way people act (longer discussion not for here). Anthropologists are studiers, primarily interested with understanding and interpreting the world for others to act on. I don't think they belong in this discussion.
Marxists and Christians absolutely have a TON in common. I will agree on that. I don't blanket condemn anyone who isn't pushing their views along side with the help they give. I do have very direct experience with a wide variety of Christians (from Catholics to Greek Orthodox to fundamentalist Presbyterians) and many of them did some sort of mission work. The vast majority of it had little to do with religion, but without fail they all prayed with the people they were helping and helped work towards some greater mainstay of Christian faith in the area (usually working on building some Church, repairing some Church). Unfortunately I think missionary work is inextricably about the broader goals, and it's not as clear cut as you make it out to say you are helping someone - this is a slippery slope to cultural imperialism.
I obviously don't have any issue with feeding people, and helping them rebuild after disaster (widespread like war, or personal like homelessness), but take a nation like Korea. Before Americans came in it was almost entirely Buddhist. After the Korean War the Americans came in and said "hey we'll help rebuild your nation, just let us build this Church." In many cases the first generation (those who made these deals) paid little mind to the Churches, but the second generation was completely culturally slaughtered. South Korea now has a thriving economy and is between 35 and 40% fundamentalist Christian. It is now culturally necessary to be Christian in many cases to be in the upper class (the wealthy social networks are mostly Christian). So look what the trade off there was in terms of culture for stability.
Is it not possible to understand that such a thing could happen on a personal scale as well? There is no moral ambiguity about feeding someone who is starving, there absolutely is when you package that food with your beliefs. You force them to compromise themselves, and I think that's neither useful nor appropriate.
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In response to this second comment:
In the places I have any experience with full of desperately poor people, the outsiders who decide to settle down, whatever their official institutional ideology, mostly care about helping people, at an individual level.
> this is a slippery slope to cultural imperialism.
I’m somewhat skeptical about this. In the places with the most severe cultural imperialism – for instance, Latin America – said imperialism was done in the name of god and the king, but was at root much more about material advantage and personal self-interest (read: theft) than salvation, the latter being mostly a convenient rationalization.
Today, pretty much everywhere in the world has been under the “cultural imperialist” influence of the west, linked by a globalized economic system.
Moreover, I think you oversimplify in suggesting that Christianization is just a mechanism for hegemony. I don’t know much about Korean culture or religious diversity, but from your description it sounds to me like Korean elites seized on Christianity and bent it to their own ends, quite independently of the missionaries who had brought it there. At the same time, Korea was industrializing and urbanizing full speed, building an export-led factory economy. We could speculate about what the power structure would be like in Korea if the population had remained entirely Buddhist, but it’s not as if feudalism would have survived, and I don’t think the outcome can be blamed on Christian missionaries without likewise indicting centuries of Western technological advances, foreign bankers, American consumers, and the rest of the prevailing world economic system. (And Koreans of all stripes, too.) In short, it’s complicated.
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For what it’s worth, I also find packaging aid to desperately poor people with religious ideology to be distasteful/awkward and agree that it is potentially abusive.
"For what it’s worth, I also find packaging aid to desperately poor people with religious ideology to be distasteful/awkward and agree that it is potentially abusive."
This was my main point and we agree :)
One of our strategies is outreach, the kind described in this article. The reason we do aggressive outreach is because many of the homeless have been burnt by their past shelter experience so they are resistant to any offers of housing. Obviously, we cant force them to accept housing. But we go to the homeless, day in and day out, and offer them help and its done in the most benign way.
We do target other areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. There are teams dedicated to each neighborhood and one by one, we hope to house the homeless.
If you are curious, you can learn more at http://www.commonground.org
Myself and many others like me are thankful for the work you are doing. Keep it up!
Why must some people make everything about race?
Source: www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30442.pdf ("By race, the homeless population was estimated to be, on average, 49% African-American, 35% white, 13% Hispanic, 2% Native American and 1% Asian.")
Using the phrase "poor people" instead of "poor black people" is equally effective -- more, actually, because "poor black people" makes you wonder why the hell it matters that they're black -- and has the virtue of not perpetuating (many) people's unconscious associations of "black" with "poor".
I mean, I bet these guys only help homeless people because, while they're out on the streets doing that, it's a convenient opportunity for kicking puppies . . .
They are in fact the parasites of the bourgeoisie, getting sweet salaries from a bankrupt, overtaxed city while pretending to be performing a good deed.
~OT: I once worked as a charity fundraiser and had more than a few encounters with homelessness, one of which (a few years after leaving the job) left me quite stunned. The company was a bit of a stop-gap for those that could and would handle it, with accommodation, food, and a pretty interesting lifestyle all thrown in.
I once found myself in a pub, however, and a homeless guy came up and asked me for a bit of spare change. Having built up a healthy respect for people and torn down my impulse to judge on the basis of only a very small amount of information (from my exp. in said job), I gave the guy what I could when, looking in his eyes, I saw my friend. A guy I had worked with as a fundraiser, who, after a brief spell of bad luck had fallen through the gaps of society and ended up having to constantly climb. I did what I could for the guy, but more importantly he did so much for me - I had never realised destitution was so close (or that the climb back up was so high).
Another time I met something I can only describe as otherworldly.... it was almost sacred. Take what you will from it. I was approached (this was while fundraising) by a small, fat, black guy in comfortable, though slightly disheveled clothes in his late 50s or thereabouts. As he came close it occured to me that he didn't exist... I honestly cannot understand the instantaneous clarity of that thought... maybe he was just too much of a cliche for my mind to deal with, but there was something more, an aura that came from somewhere deep within him, from somewhere I don't think I have. He took my hand and started talking to me as though it was the most ordinary things in the world, and he proceeded to tell me about his pebble. He'd been fondling it in his other hand and as I noticed it he started telling me about where he'd found it and all the things that could have been while that pebble had remained hidden. And that, he said, was his point. My pebble was currently hidden, and I was close to finding it. It could be a stone, a coin, a woman or even the world! The point was that it was mine and that it had been sitting, passive, until the day I, and I alone, would come across it and bind myself to it...
I don't even know why that's worth sharing with you. Most people I tell, I'm sure, just think I was seduced by the romantic ramblings of a mad old man... maybe so, but I think that moment, myself, the old man and what he said deserve a great deal more dignity, even divinity, than that. I choose to make that moment spiritual (and I'm not by any means "religious")....
REEEKS of judgment. Maybe he's fine on his own? I think it's fair to bet that he's been homeless longer than the outreach people have been outreach people, maybe he knows something they dont (like he's doing what he wants to?).
I'm all for helping those who want it, but there is a thin line between assistance and judgment as so many others are pointing out...
Housing certainly should not be forced upon him, but when someone is hurting themselves sometimes you have to push them to stop. Its never so black and white.
I'd assert that the people doing cross-nation marathons spending night after night sleeping in a tent on a roadside are far more mentally ill than a man choosing not to have a home.
He doesn't need to be treated for being homeless, if he has a condition he needs to be treated for its cause not its effect.
Where I grew up there was a chronic homeless man. Throughout the summer months he saved enough money to ride out the winter in a cheap apartment. He busked with a guitar and harmonica and was homeless by choice. He frequently refused people's donation if they threw in anything too big, especially to the kids and teenagers.
As he once said to me, he chose to be homeless and live off generosity rather than be homed and live off charity.
Providing for homeless people is definitely society's responsibility. I don't think we really want to make people "institutions" and call them iconic because they've camped out somewhere for a long time.
If 100 people decide to camp out in Time Square because there's a lot of tourist quarters to gather, is this ok? Should we grant seniority if there are ever too many? I'm sure you've heard the stories about "homeless" people in NYC who make a good living begging for small change and have nice apartments.
On a side note, my girlfriend is opening a residential shelter for women on Monday! Three levels of housing (short, medium, and long term) and almost five years in the making. It's called Florence House (part of Preble Street) in Portland, Maine.
This country has and owes a lot of money but we waste a sh--load too.
Or the levels given off by a new sofa? Or new carpeting?
What about trailers purchased on the regular market, are they any different?
BTW, I'm not trying to say we should ignore the issue, but rather extend it everywhere.
It's de-humanizing.
For a second there I did a double take because it resembled an old article from The Onion, which was pointing out how journalists do this so often that nobody notices.
Do a search and replace on the article, replace the homeless man's name "Heavy" with "animal", and the article still makes perfect sense, except instead of being about sociology, it's now zoology, like one of those fluff local news pieces about some wild animal that ended up in the city limits and was causing a nuisance. Except it's a man.
"There's one homeless man left in Times Square" That is news. The article does not stray very far from the point, and covers a decent amount in a limited space. It's an effective article.
I got the same impression as korch. In several ways, it does mean the same thing. They've got a bunch of people "studying his habits and movements", figuring out where he eats and sleeps, and telling the population not to feed him because it's actually bad for him.
People, even other homeless people, are not usually treated this way, but wild animals are. At the root of the similarity, I think, is an assumption that Heavy is not capable of deciding what is in his best interest -- that he can't be reasoned with but that he might be coaxed to do what they want.
> People, even other homeless people, are not usually treated this way, but wild animals are.
Actually, it sounds to me like scholars doing social science. They gathering facts and analyzing behavior.
> At the root of the similarity, I think, is an assumption that Heavy is not capable of deciding what is in his best interest
Is this an assumption? Or is it a conclusion, based on evidence:
> “I just have this dream that all of a sudden something will snap, and he’ll say, I’d love to have housing,” said Amie Pospisil
> Heavy was far from alone on the streets of Times Square in the 1990s, when he began sleeping there frequently in the midst of a roiling mess of drug dealing, prostitution and crime.
> The social workers at Common Ground said they have no intention of pressuring Heavy to leave the streets.
It sounds like you are saying Heavy is capable of deciding what is in his best interest. If that is the case, then it follows that living on the streets of Times Square is in his best interest, since that is what he decided. Are you really comfortable with this conclusion?
The social workers, on the other hand, seem genuinely concerned for him, but they are hesitant to overstep the bounds of human dignity and 'pressure' him, physically or otherwise, to make more prudent decisions.
I see little justification for a critique of the social workers, here.
The other option, to ignore him entirely, not track his movements and pretend he doesn't exist, is also a way we treat animals. Squirrels, pigeons, sparrows, ants, spiders... Yes, there is a striking parallel that's why the Onion parody was hilarious. But despite the grain of truth there isn't anything inherently evil about the tone.
As for telling the population not to feed him for his own good: is that a good thing or a bad thing to do? Ignore for a moment, parallels and parodies, and judge the facts as you know them. (Personally, I don't agree that they should admonish people for feeding him, but it has very little to do with the idea of misplaced paternalism.)