At the corner of Broadway and 8th Street in Manhattan, there is a girl who sits all day everyday against the brick wall of a deli. She and her dog, covered with a blanket, sleep. Otherwise, she stares at nothing. Sometimes she looks high. Sometimes she is crying. The dirt on her face is visible. She wears a sweatshirt and a toboggan. She looks my age if not younger. Her sign reads something like, 'traveling, please anything will help.' Traveling.
I know because I worked in the building next door to the deli last summer. What a strange sensation to pass her on my way to work everyday and convince myself that there is nothing I can do now, I am living on my parents' income in a temporary residency for students, which has an exclusive guest policy and anyway I'm leaving the city in six weeks.
There was one night the previous winter, also in Manhattan, when a bunch of us on the Duke Leadership and Arts program were going out to party. We were navigating the subway system, dressed and giggly and some were tipsy already, and it was "f--ing freezing! Oh my gosh," when we passed a guy under newspapers. It was probably twenty degrees or colder. This human being was not wearing a coat. We were on our way to buy eight dollar drinks, probably several, totaling say thirty bucks a piece for an evening that given our intended level of alcohol consumption would not be memorable in any sense of the word.
Yes, we could have called social services (not this late), or the police department, but most easily, one of us could have given this person his or her coat, and we all could have chipped in what we would have spent on partying to replace it. Hell--we each could contribute half of our allocated party money to the cause, still gone out just more temperately. In the end, I spent at least twenty bucks on alcohol and cover--plus my five dollar contribution to the thirty dollar cab ride home (because it was cold).
In the cab, I brought up the old guy. With a few drinks in me, I articulated the above idea and reprimanded all of us for not doing the obviously moral thing in the situation. The guy sitting next to me said, "It's more complicated than you're making it out to be. But it's good you're thinking about these issues. That's what matters."
It is a strange project to begin distinguishing between real need and manufactured need in the world. I have too much stuff, stuff I don't need and probably don't appreciate as much as I would if I had less , and there are other human beings who live without a sense of freedom because they have to spend all of their time and energy working just to make ends meet. I don't need an eloquent philosophical argument to convince me that this is not an optimal state of society. It is not. And the strangest part is that the possibility of giving this man my coat sounds so radical to those of us who have accustomed ourselves to existing harmoniously with society's lowest caste, handing them a dollar or two and moving on, allowing guilt, when it surfaces, to subside with the memory of the encounter.
Why is that someone like me can recognize in time enough to act the option to meet real need by giving up what for me is an imagined need, know in that moment that both of us will probably be better off for it (inasmuch as we are happiest when we have our basic needs met without so much wealth that we have been corrupted into depending on and guarding vehemently stuff we only think we need), and still choose a martini over keeping someone warm? Fears that money will be used for drugs, booze, I-only-want-to-choose-the-best-course-of-action-to-help-the homeless-as-an-emousamorphous-body-of-non-individuals-is-by-giving-to-non-profits-bull-shit aside, what makes me assume as too large a sacrifice the offering of my coat to this human being who is clearly at high risk of hypothermia? As if I couldn't have tolerated the cold for fifteen minutes, scurried back to the apartment to select a replacement jacket among the fifty garments in my closet, and set out into warmly into the cold again.
So one year too late, in response to my friend in the cab, to the man I chose not to see and to the person I no longer wish to be:
I say, no. Sacrificing an obvious frivolity (in this case, a portion of a fun night) in order to meet another human beings life-or-death need is not more complicated than handing the man a f---ing coat and wrapping up in a friend's--or just hurrying home to grab a replace garment to keep me warm.
No. Thinking about the 250,000 to 3,000,000 people who are homeless in America is not what matters, when 'homeless' means they are sleeping in public spaces where increasingly laws are being passed prohibiting them from functioning as human beings--urinating, bathing, defecating. (If you live on public grounds because you are homeless, and it is illegal to urinate or cook or sleep on public grounds, it means you must find private property on which to do these things--and few restaurants or homeowners welcome the usage of their facilities by people who are not only non-clients [they cannot afford to be] but also tend to be the smelliest and dirtiest people around [because they can't bathe--they don't have anywhere to], meaning you have fewer and fewer places to function as a human being.)
This is an issue that doesn't require much reasoning, as much as we hate to hear that. A coat is not going to facilitate a cocaine addiction. A man needing a coat is a man needing a coat. The judgment call is not that complicated. It's visceral. It's raw. It is about how we face human pain and human excess wealth in the same space in the same moment. Head on. No friendly non-profits to sugar the disparity. It's the suffering man, and it's the partying girl, and she has a decision to make. She chooses to party. What sort of world are we living in? Or what sort of person am I? Either way. Jesus.
Mary Adkins is a Trinity senior. Her column appears on selected Fridays.
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