Of the homeless it can be said that no urban predicament has been so thoroughly injected with despair. Christ’s admonition, after all, was rather too absolute: console and sustain thy neighbor, where “neighbor” is construed in the widest sense. Take this as axiomatic: when the gap between ideal and possible is overlarge, ethical systems break down. In New York a literalist Samaritan who left his home to buy cat food would be paralyzed by virtue before he went one block. Conscience, done in by numbers, has become a scofflaw. There is demoralization: even guilt collapses. And the needy receive a discharge of bitterness which can aggravate their condition further. That “certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” where the Samaritan found him, but doing mitzvahs was easier then. A welfare inn cost less than three pence.
And so, full of prejudice and disgruntlement, I went down from Central Park West to the Bowery. It was an Edward Hopper afternoon: tenement walls seemed just one bright and innocent pastel composition. Two hundred homeless men were demonstrating outside the Kenton Hotel. This is a shelter for single men: the “best in New York,” they tell me, if that superlative can be used without irony. I am, as you know, a habitué of demonstrations. I saw at once that even the Left had done triage on the homeless: there was not one Spartacist-Trotskyist broadsheet. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” but let’s not be ridiculous, comrade. I saw, as well, that I often could not distinguish a homeless man from his sympathizer and advocate. In general these were not the lapel droolers who flop across your windshield on Houston Street. Homelessness has come to middle-class New York.
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