Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) by Anna Quindlen Page B
Authors: Anna Quindlen
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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 havethem 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. Reliefkitchens 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
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 havethem 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. Reliefkitchens 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
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