Undodged Bullets and Broken Eggs

02-02-2015

By Ian Storey

“The trouble begins whenever one comes to the conclusion that no other ‘lesser’ evil is worth fighting…all historical and political evidence clearly points to the more-than-intimate connection between the lesser and the greater evil…with the wisdom of hindsight, it is easy today to formulate what Stalin actually did: he changed…the proverb ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ into a veritable dogma: ‘You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.’”

– Hannah Arendt, “The Eggs Speak Up”

Recently, there was a moment that struck me; it literally made me dizzy with how perfectly it encapsulated a political problem that was, at that particular moment at least, also personal.

[caption id="attachment_15315" align="alignleft" width="300"] Ken, left, and Frenchie, right, ask for spare change with their dog Penny outside clothier J. August. Ken ran an outdoor book store on the sidewalk of Massachusetts Ave. for eight years before having to shut down in 2013. (Source: The Harvard Crimson)[/caption]

There is an older gentleman who sleeps near my stop on the subway most nights, and about a week ago, he told me the funniest joke about pigeons I will likely ever hear. Due to the oncoming blizzard, Boston had shut down its transit lines – in these winter months, one of the critical refuges of the city’s growing homeless population – and I had been preoccupied with wondering whether he had secured shelter. I sat down in the coffee shop, opened my laptop, and gave the BBC homepage a half-hearted glance while I fiddled with other things. Suddenly, my fears for my friend and for the lives of several of the homeless in the Square I knew rushed in at once, all in the form of a simple contradiction. It was not the sheer cognitive dissonance of knowing that people would soon need to fight for their survival against a blizzard beneath Harvard, the wealthiest university in the nation and one of the most powerful educational institutions in the world. Harvard, as do many related institutions, does engage the issue of high rates of homelessness in its Squares, though certainly not without its failings. Neither was it fully the sheer reflection of my own privileges in my thinking and worrying, so emblematic of so many things. The contradiction that so struck me and sent my brain reeling was the headline there in front of me. “Mayor defends New York Snow Warnings: ‘We dodged a bullet’”. But my friend, and countless other homeless persons, were not so lucky.

As the many, many groups and individuals who work and volunteer daily across this country will instantly attest, there are few endemic societal problems that involve a more complex set of intersecting issues – economic distribution, mental health, familial dynamics, nutrition distribution networks – than homelessness. It is simply, as James O’Connell of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program writes, “a bewilderingly complex public health challenge that has long thwarted simple solutions.” But Mayor de Blasio’s comment, and the coverage of this storm, also highlighted that there is one problem that is almost never counted in that “bewilderingly complex…challenge” when it is spoken about at the level of public policy, and it is perhaps the most important problem of all.

[caption id="attachment_15316" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Charity (Source: Jim and Nathan's Big Adventure)[/caption]

The United States has a long and proud tradition of building responses to its problems by combining local networks with state and federal efforts. Above all, it maintains an intensely defensive (and rightly so) attachment to charitable giving as a force for social change and community improvement. The result in this case is that the array of organizations and charities and government agencies that address the many facets of homelessness is no less structurally bewildering and patchwork than the problem itself. Whether that is a sustainable and effective way of addressing the problem – and if it can even be otherwise – I leave to others more experienced to decide. But the enormously devoted yet nevertheless piecemeal nature of the country’s response to homelessness is reflective of the deeper problem that can be seen through this storm. When I say it, I am saying nothing more than what the homeless and their fellow advocates have known and spoken for decades: that what we face in this moment is not just a question of allocation of resources, of institution–building and advocacy training, although it is all of those things. We face a problem of language and appearance, or more accurately, of language and disappearance.

When we talk about these questions in the politically-charged terms of a “right to shelter,” as New York’s sometimes controversial law terms it, or “the right to adequate housing,” in the language of the UN Commission for Human Rights, the abstraction of the language makes it easier to evade the reality that we are talking about here. Suddenly – and this is the danger that always comes with the promise of talk of rights – in that abstraction, the specters of “leeches on the taxpayer” and people “working the system” sound not just plausible but to many quite persuasive, boosting the instinct of some to decry government interventionalism. To talk about a thing for what it is does nothing to make the truth any easier to fix, and calling a spade a spade cannot wish away the incredibly complex intersection of institutional problems that create and sustain this issue. But it does make a difference to the Eggs – the men and women of every age and vulnerability who bear the costs of our system’s failures – that while some of us collectively sigh at relief that we’ve “dodged a bullet,” we also call a crime the crime that it is: human beings freezing to death. Freezing to death, in the wealthiest society in the world.

[caption id="attachment_15319" align="alignright" width="300"] Help our a frozen young homeless man (Source: Flickr)[/caption]

I will not criticize Mayor de Blasio’s claim “we did what was necessary to keep everyone safe” in the face of what being called a “potentially historic” blizzard by issuing strong storm warnings and provisionally imposing a transportation ban. That “better-safe-than-sorry” instinct, as he puts it, is laudable, as far a phrase goes. Nor am I implying that his city’s emergency response system lacks efforts to protect the poor and the homeless in extreme conditions. That would be false and denigrate the efforts of those individuals who work extremely hard, in just those extreme conditions, for exactly that purpose. Indeed, there is every indication that his administration will continue his immediate predecessor’s attempts to effectively reform the city’s shelter system and support for outreach work, though his particular methods for combating the city’s rising homelessness problem have proved controversial. It is a problem with which every metropolitan (and rural, no less) community will continue to wrestle, and I am not certain, even if it could be avoided, that a patchwork response is not potentially the most effective. That, I can’t say.

But I will say without reservation and with little inclination to temperate words that a confrontation must be had with the simple fact that de Blasio’s “we” did not mean everyone, not in the context of his utterance, and still less in each of the ears of the people who heard it. Our problem is with what “we” and “everyone” mean when we say and hear them. The “we” each of us hears is different, and as hands are wrung and brows furrowed about transit delays and productivity costs and electricity supply response times, many, many of those “everyones” would not even entertain an image of a homeless person let alone any wish to attend to them. If this were not a problem of our very different “everyones,” the United States would not have one of the highest rates of homeless mortality in the industrialized world. If we meant everyone when we spoke of the desire to protect “everyone” from the dangers of what they simply call “a killing cold” where I come from, our homeless problem would be quite different. If our “we's" were truly a we, we would not have what those who study this call “zones of excess mortality,” or in less guarded moments, “death zones” (Boston has one; New York City, more), where rates of mortality exceed even areas where the Federal Government has declared “natural disaster areas.” If our response to this problem has been piecemeal and patchwork, it is because our understanding of the problem is piecemeal and patchwork, not for lack of awareness but for lack of the problem appearing for what it is. Perhaps, in Arendt’s terms, this is a very specific problem of the failure of many of our imaginations as our storms descend: that when the Weather Channel comes on and we imagine the impending problems and fiascos that “everyone” will face, we do not imagine those who most need to be seen.

As of the evening I write this, there are no available statistics on the number in the Greater Boston metropolitan area who died of cold-related deaths beginning the evening of January 26^th or in the extended health aftermath. When they come, if they come (they often don’t)—the sheer difficulty of tracking deaths in a population that is already difficult to know from its outside means that a significant number of deaths will go uncounted and unnoticed except by a few in the community close to them, if they even have one—“we” will likely never read about them. And that is a death that is more, or less, than a death. That is a death that is not only a death but also a quiet, slow, and painful disappearance. And a world of disappearance has dodged no bullets.

(Featured Image: A homeless man waits for people to pass by to ask for money during a winter; Source: Politico)